If one were told that there was something in the corner by someone running on a life-threateningly severe sleep deficit, most rational people would find it easy to dismiss. But Takagiri was a flamebearer, and things are often weird for us, especially when it comes to what we see. The eyes are the window to the soul, after all. So, just to be on the safe side, the first thing I did was yell.
“EBI!”
This didn’t actually summon Ebi like a spirit from the ether; as far as I was aware, she was still up on the eighteenth floor, and we were in the basement, and it still took time to traverse the space between. However, she was hooked into all the CCTV cameras, the PA system, and, let’s face it, probably also my phone. In a split second, she heard me, reviewed the footage, and relayed my panic to Ai. Moments later, the Emerald Radiance charged through the door to join us.
She entered with superhuman physicality, nearly shoving the door off its hinges and launching from the threshold to right in front of us in what felt like a single step. The tattoo on her back was aglow, softly shining through the fabric of her ratty tank top in most places but retina-piercingly bright where it peeked out at her shoulders and the base of her neck. The emerald ink burned near lime as the Radiance stared at the corner Takagiri had indicated.
“Ebi says there’s nothing on the cameras. Izumi-san?”
Takagiri replied in Japanese, sounding unsure enough that it was clear she was saying something along the lines of “I think I’m hallucinating.”
Ai nodded and materialized something into her hand—a pair of what looked like snowboarding goggles, its lens reflecting the room in blue. She pulled it onto her head and stared into the corner.
“Nani mo nai.”
“J—just a hallucination, then?” I asked, uncertain. My non-existent hackles were raised—removed though they were by blood magic—and my skin crawled with the insistence that something was there, despite all evidence to the contrary. I forced myself to relax, trying to focus on the exceedingly awesome tech Ai had whipped out. “What do the goggles do?”
I knew the answer, of course, but this was a self-distraction tactic to force some normality onto the spookiness, not genuine interest.
“Ripple visualizer.” She pulled the headset off and checked the top edge of the padded rim for something. “A little red and pink in the walls, but that’s just Ebi.” She put the goggles back into her pocketspace, apparently satisfied, but cast a suspicious glower at the creepy corner just to verify, as though her unmodified meat-eyes might reveal something the ten thousand-dollar detection equipment hadn’t.
Takagiri, for her part, was alternating between doing the same and rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Kieta,” she muttered. “Gone.”
Ai nodded, at last willing to turn her back on the empty corner and face us. “I’m going to call it a hallucination. Izumi-san, mou daijoubu nano?”
Takagiri nodded several times, a small, jerky, repetitious motion that seemed to be more to reassure herself than to reply to Ai’s question. She muttered something in response, then said it again in English.
“I don’t want to be here.”
“Okay. Ezzen, save what you’re working on, and let’s go somewhere else—my office.”
“Huh?” I blinked. “Oh, yeah, sure.” I scooted my chair back in to reach the keyboard.
As my hand wrapped around the mouse, I felt something wrong. The joints of my fingers ached. That wasn’t the most uncommon thing in the world, but it was usually a product of the weather, and it simply wasn’t cold enough in here for it. And as far as I knew, the only other thing that caused my hand to ache like that was—
“Red ripple.” I turned to Ai and raised my makeshift ripple detector.
She understood my meaning immediately and pulled out the goggles again, tugging them over her head in a hurry, ignoring how the strap caught her ponytail against her head. She frowned. “Nothing.”
As she turned back to me and Takagiri, though, she froze and sucked in a breath. Takagiri looked woozy, blinking repeatedly, and was wobbling on her feet. The ache in my fingers spread to the stump of my foot as Ai and I realized simultaneously that Takagiri was the source of the ripple. Ai reached out and grabbed her wrist, and Takagiri jerked to wakefulness with a scream. She looked around, crazy-eyed and terrified, as though not remembering where she was.
The pain in my hand spiked to a boiling throb as Takagiri locked eyes with Ai—then began to ebb away as she shuddered and sagged against the wall. She sank into herself, heaving sobs of terror that pulled at my heart. Ai immediately dropped to one knee to console her while I stood there, awkward and unsettled. I wanted to help—but first, I wanted to get the hell out of this room. I turned and cast one more wary glance at the corner that had started all this; still empty. Ai noticed and asked Takagiri something, presumably whether she still saw anything. She shook her head slowly, nonverbal.
We cleared out anyway. I spent the next minute still awkwardly standing there while Ai coaxed Takagiri to her feet, encouraging and soothing, with all the protective care of a big sister despite being easily twenty-five years younger than the Hikanome leader-assassin. As she finally convinced her to get up, the Emerald Radiance shot me a glance full of worry and suppressed panic.
We were running out of time.
Ai took Takagiri to the prosthetic fitting room to make sure she was alright—even aside from the psychological effects of whatever she’d dreamt in that micro-sleep, spilling out that much red ripple just by existing was never good. I would have come along, but this wasn’t my specialty; my way of helping Takagiri lay in helping the Radiances bring Sugawara to justice and end his nocturnal assaults on her mind, and that meant I had to keep working on the mantle patch.
I awkwardly wished them luck and returned to my room to keep working, hurrying to get as far away from the creepy encounter as I could. That meant another trip back down the basement hall, some time going up the elevator, and a half-hobbling walk across the landscape of beanbag chairs that made up the upper-level common area. The whole time, I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting yet hoping not to see…something. Sugawara’s ghost, I suppose. By the time I returned to my room, my nerves had settled somewhat, and once I threw off my shoes, disengaged my prosthetic, curled up in the big, padded chair Ebi had gotten me, and booted up my PC, I felt better. At least now I had something else to focus on.
It was wonderful to have my own proper workstation again, and this one was far in excess of anything I’d had access to previously. With three monitors, I had more screen space than ever before; no more splitting my single screen to have a too-cramped GWalk session on the left half and various documentation on the right, or being forced to tab between them for the luxury of full-width windows. Instead, I now had a full, high-resolution screen of GWalk on the center display, all the documentation I needed on the left, and the right monitor gave me space to always be able to see the chatroom. It occurred to me that I could maybe rotate that monitor to a vertical position to have the chatroom on top and something for music on the bottom, but that was a project for later.
Takagiri had given me enough theory to go off of; the swords were straightforward, and I had a solid picture in my head of how they damaged the mantles, so from there, patching the vulnerability in each mantle’s diagram was only two steps: modify the relevant mechanisms and make sure I hadn’t broken anything downstream in the process. The core of the first step was to address the leak on the gyroscope; Takagiri had briefly described the necessary changes for that, so I knew where I was headed.
The gyro assembly as implemented in the Radiances’ mantles was a gyroscope in name only, with no actual mechanical, electronic, or optical assemblies like you’d see in an aircraft. Instead, the same function was achieved with an {ALIGN}:4-{DIFFERENTIATE} block, which was a cheap, high-resolution way to determine which direction was up as well as account for rotational changes by just multiplexing the four spatial cardinal directions and checking for changes in orientation. It was a standard implementation for when precision was important; in this case, to ensure a clean interface with the senses of the piloting Radiance, because a misalignment between their internal sense of orientation and the mantle’s actual position would render the magical construct basically uncontrollable.
In most contexts, the small amount of free pink ripple exuded by this approach was negligible; within the information-altering domain of pink ripple, the particular effect of this leak would usually just pigeonhole into some minor color distortions on nearby photographs, or maybe key changes in music if there happened to be any. But Takagiri’s swords, and any other anti-mantle weapons wielded by other Sugawara loyalists using the same principle, were specifically designed to use this free ripple to damage the gyroscope upstream in the chain and, from there, mangle a bunch of other systems downstream, so this ripple had to be addressed. It was essentially a cyberattack—leak, vulnerability, exploit. So I needed to make a patch.
I could have replaced the gyroscope assembly wholesale with another approach—an LM imitation of a physical gyroscope would be fun to model and wouldn’t have this problem—but that would require testing, which GWalk couldn’t do for this sort of sensory and psychomotive interfacing, not without some extra magical hardware or directly asking one of the Radiances to implement it. And we were still on a time budget here; a full teardown and replacement of a core component of the mantle—which might not even work correctly—was unacceptable when we had maybe twelve hours. Besides, there was a simpler solution: I could just turn the pink ripple into another color with a glyph that could take the color and do something safer and more predictable with it.
Red ripple was right out, obviously, given Amane’s particular vulnerabilities—and nobody save Hina would want their mantle to produce pain as a side effect where not absolutely necessary, nor other sensory effects that would be just as bad for controllability as the aforementioned gyroscope misalignment. Green was similar—coming from an LM construct rather than an organic body, it couldn’t be trusted to reliably pigeonhole into something non-biohazardous for bystanders. Besides, almost none of the glyphs for that color took pink inputs predictably; that was one of the big issues with biomancy.
Orange, the color of ripple concerned with space and distance, was also a no-go. Orange glyphs tended toward spatial distortion, like pocketspaces or the fourspace storage mechanism for the mantles, as well as a bunch of weaving utility glyphs like multiplexers and tension modulators; control flow, in programming terms. Since the actual implementation of all these diagrams was literally weaving Flame through physical space, arbitrarily routing free ripple into orange was almost always a bad idea because it could mess up the whole lattice. Silver and white had no glyphs; they were theoretical models for phenomena more than anything else—barring Yuuka and Miyoko, both of whom interfaced with them glyphlessly. I still didn’t have a clue how.
So, that left blue, the set of glyphs concerned with kinetics and entropy. I could vent energy as heat or alpha radiation or various kinds of kinetic ‘kicks’, all of which were helpful in some situations. In this case though, for the constraints of the mantles’ function and concerns about collateral damage, the obvious and most widely used candidate was {SEVER}. In the diagram, I stuck it in right after the {DIFFERENTIATE}, and a little tinkering with tension and orientation gave me what I was looking for.
What were we severing? The water vapor in the air. Being able to break hydrogen from oxygen was an enormously important process for modern power generation, one of the key ways that magitech had changed everything at an industrial scale—but for this application, I only cared about getting rid of the pink ripple, and {SEVER} was elegant because it was no awkward kinetics, no heat, and no radiation—just hydrogen and oxygen into the surrounding air, and in fairly negligible quantities.
Implementing these changes was a lot of dragging, dropping, changing numbers in boxes, hitting “Build,” and tweaking the numbers again until everything worked how I wanted it to. The {SEVER} had to lead into the rest of the mantle, like the {DIFFERENTIATE} had originally, so it was important that it didn’t mess with the pink signals that were actually being used, only the leakage we were trying to get rid of. This was something GWalk could optimize for me, with the right constraints in place, but I still felt obligated to give everything an eyeball check.
The downstream effects were slightly different across each of the three mantles I was working on; the gyroscope module was the same, but in Hina’s mantle, it also fed the fourth dimensional position and rotation data directly to her neural link, since her mutated brain could take it, and that needed some extra work to integrate. By contrast, Alice and Yuuka’s mantles had intuitive controls for movement in the third dimension, but they had to traverse the w-axis via instrumentation. I wondered what it would take for me to also be able to freely and naturally move through the fourth dimension the way my girlfriend and the Vaetna could. I’d been helpless when trapped outside reality—locking onto my spear to return to Earth had been a clever bit of magic, but conditional, and it hadn’t been as automatic as just stepping kata-ward back home. I wanted that freedom.
I also wanted to take a break now that the broad strokes of the solution were in place. For the first time in two hours, I relaxed my focus on the GWalk window and datasheets and diagrams and sat back in my chair, letting my other senses and awareness of my surroundings seep back in. My neck hurt, for one; I’d been sitting too far forward. I twisted it this way and that, looking for a satisfying crack, but got none. Instead, I was alarmed to find that my usual range of motion had expanded; I could turn my head well past my shoulder without discomfort; more of the changes to my flexibility that I’d seen previously.
“Hm.”
I experimentally unfolded my legs from under me and hefted my right shin in my still-weak arms. I lifted my foot to my chest easily, knee and hip swiveling easily to accommodate the motion. I went even higher, until my heel touched my chin.
“Wow.”
Giddiness swept through me. It wasn’t super strength, or speed, or four-dimensional freedom, but it was still unmistakable proof that I’d been altered, mutated beyond the old boundaries of my humanity, becoming something more. We really had to document these more properly with Ai once she was less busy trying to keep Takagiri alive.
I took the giddiness with me to the chatroom, pulling it over to my main monitor. It had been buzzing along to my right throughout the process, but mostly fallen outside of my attention as I had become engrossed in the engineering task. Now, though, it was time for a proper check-in. Early afternoon in Japan was late evening for the Americans, and many of us kept poor sleep schedules, so it was pretty active around now. Unfortunately, this meant I happened to walk directly into a topic that was rather close to home.
starstar97: this kind of speculation doesnt help anyone. the official statement from hikanome put it very clearly, they’re not gonna pursue legal recourse, and todai’s paying for everything
ks3glimmer: that doesn’t absolve sapphire of responsibility! she attacked thousands of civilians, and hundreds of them are going to have long term ripple sickness. there have to be consequences beyond just paying fines. that was barely an apology
Glimmer was at it again, I saw, rapping my fingers on the keyboard as my good mood soured; a mild benefit to my sharp reduction in chatroom presence since coming to Todai had been that I hadn’t had to put up with much of their direct, combative nature. Apparently, my luck had run out, and at an especially poor time: Hina’s official televised apology had just concluded. Twenty minutes ago, according to the clock. I hadn’t wanted to watch it anyway, not when I basically already knew what she was going to say. She’d apologized to me already, after all, and promised to do the same with her teammates. Though based on how my conversation with Alice had gone, I wasn’t sure if she’d actually gotten around to it yet.
At any rate, since the televised apology had taken about twenty minutes, and had ended twenty minutes ago, that meant Star had been acting as Hina’s lawyer here in the chatroom for forty minutes; a noble but unenviable task given that Glimmer seemed intent on painting my girlfriend in as poor a light as possible. Sometimes, I wondered why Sky even let such a combative person stick around.
I decided to intervene, mindful to not make Star’s life any harder by accidentally incriminating Hina further.
ezzen: Hey.
moth30: oh its the uh
moth30: ezzen of the hour
My brow furrowed ever so slightly. I liked the gender-ambiguous turn of phrase, but the message itself felt slightly ominous.
starstar97: hi ez
ezzen: Hi. Anything going on other than the apology?
This did not work.
ks3glimmer: hi ezzen
ks3glimmer: whats your take on sapphire, as someone who lives with her
ks3glimmer: i remember you saying she kinda freaked you out?
“Fuck,” I groaned. I’d forgotten that, as far as the chatroom was concerned, I had a fairly negative relationship with Hina, one characterized by the discomfort I’d felt in the first few days with her, when she’d been feeling me out and courting me via repeated intrusions on my personal space. Summarizing my swing from that state of affairs to the current mess of our relationship simply wasn’t going to be possible without breaking opsec; my fingers hesitated on the keys as I tried to figure out how to express how things had changed.
Fortunately, the rest of the chat also felt that Glimmer’s pivot was uncalled for.
moth30: dont be hounding them, glim
moth30: probably kind of a nightmare in lighthouse right now and trying to make ez of all people incriminate them is just unfair
thanasen: ^
thanasen: ngl ive kinda forgotten ezzen was even there
thanasen: might go refresh on that
thanasen: but yeah, lets drop it here
thanasen: slow day in the lab here
ks3glimmer: -_- i dont feel what i said was particularly out of pocket but sure
ks3glimmer: its not like ebi-furai ever talks about what its like working there so i was just wondering
The others were quick to insist on the change of topic.
starstar97: im good! work sucked but i got pizza
moth30: chillin. you missed the other day’s stream, right?
ezzen: uhh
Five seconds of googling later, I figured out what he meant: there had been a Vaetna stream two days ago, while I was out cold, finishing up the work that had been happening the day I’d been flametouched a few weeks ago. I became a little upset at myself for missing it; three weeks ago, I’d not have dreamed of missing a single Vaetna stream, to such an extent that they had defined my sleep schedule. It was upsetting that I was falling out of touch with the circles that had made up my whole life, even though my actual, material conditions had come much closer to realizing my dream of becoming a Vaetna.
Then again, this time wasn’t really my fault.
ezzen: Was out cold, sorry.
moth30: lmao you don’t need to apologize for surviving
moth30: nice hair btw
moth30: why the change? (if thats a comfy topic)
Oh. Right. Even though my new hair had been a steady weight on my head and shoulders, I’d barely given it any thought and had mostly forgotten it was there—I hadn’t even looked in a mirror since the morning of the barbecue. The orange strands, which had begun their lives as a perfectly laminar curtain of dark LM, were now starting to get tangled and messy, as was inevitable when it was long enough to go down my back. I didn’t actually know how to manage that—just brush it in the shower? I wondered if I could avoid asking the Radiances about it and learn entirely through YouTube. Though the idea of Hina helping brush my hair in my spacious shower was…I shook it off.
More importantly, Moth’s message was a reminder that everyone had seen my new hair. My stomach lurched as I thought of all the Hikanome members holding up their phones, recording me and Yuuka opening the tunnel, and then all the drama at the end of our fight with Takagiri. It was global news—which meant my ill-gotten hairstyle had been immortalized on camera and seen by millions. This would have been bad enough in itself, but everyone also knew that the hairstyle was new, since I’d been caught on camera briefly during my escape from the PCTF. I had mostly been a dark lump in the short, handheld video, but that was enough to indicate the change from brown to neon orange, from neck length to back length.
But it was a change I didn’t hate. Being seen for it felt bad, and it made me feel somewhat exposed, but the actual change of hair was growing on me. And these were my friends. I swallowed and decided to be brave.
ezzen: Thanks. It was an accident, blood magic. I got a haircut I hated and used magic to fix it, then screwed up and changed the color.
starstar97: it looks great!
moth30: ^
starstar97: honestly fabulous while you were fighting, blowing in the shockwaves like that
The compliments made me feel shockingly good, a mixture of relief and just…elation. Was this the rumored gender euphoria? Whatever it was, it was nice. I was a little surprised that seemed to be the sum total of reactions, though. Something compelled me to probe.
ezzen: …No comment on the use of blood magic over glyphcraft?
moth30: even the great ezzen feels the irresistible siren song of unsafe shortcuts
moth30: we’ve all been there
[Direct Message] starstar97: OF COURSE I HAVE COMMENT ON THE BLOOD MAGIC
I tabbed over, relieved she was going with the most direct approach—and was promptly met with the last message I had sent her, the one where I had admitted to her both the act and the fact that it may not have been due to solely Vaetna-related dysphoria. That was probably why I’d felt the need to ask that follow-up question; I’d half-put this out of my mind because it had been right between Alice cracking my gender egg and my dealing with Hina’s moping, and I’d been too physically and emotionally exhausted to check if Star had even seen the message, but some part of me must have remembered that I’d never gotten a reply.
Evidently, Star had not seen the message, and took an uncomfortably long time to follow up. My trepidation slowed the passage of time, far more mundane than when I’d tapped into Yuuka’s silversight but equally glacial, each second feeling like minutes as my best friend composed a response to my gender reveal. I couldn’t take it.
ezzen: pls hit send
starstar97: i see
A too-short message for the time she’d spent typing.
ezzen: …you see
starstar97: HOLY FUCK IM PROUD OF YOU E
starstar97: youre really valid and on the one hand its a little ridiculous that being flametouched and literally joining a magical girl team is what it took to finally crack your egg but on the other hand i know things were really hard and dysphoria haze for you before and im really proud of you for seeing it. thanks for trusting me with this
starstar97: howd it happen, other than haircut? was it like a big moment of realization after the haircut or was it like, cooking over the past couple weeks ever since coming to todai and youre only telling me now that the hair is out of the bag? its fine if thats the case btw, no judgment, i get it. youre way braver than me either way
ezzen: uh
This was a lot at once. “How did it happen” was an insanely loaded question, and one I had to tread cautiously about—as much as I trusted Star, if she knew one of her biggest idols was a trans woman like her, and moreover that Kimura was Takagiri and was therefore also trans, she’d explode. So I employed a little white lying.
ezzen: More like moment of realization, I guess?
I told the story from front to back, beginning with the dreadful, agonizing haircut and ending with where we were now, including the Radiances’ support of me after the haircut but leaving out the revelations at the very end of the inferno and the specifics of my egg-cracking conversation with Alice. Instead, I semi-invented a version of events where I enhanced my body with magic during the fighting—which was true—and that led me to the realization afterward that simply transcending my physical limits wasn’t enough, not in concert with my very strong feelings about my body and facial hair.
ezzen: So yeah, it’s all kind of a big mush of Vaetna transhumanism and, like, not wanting to be male? Or at least not liking a male, human body? I don’t really know yet but I’m trying to figure it out between all the political shit going on over here.
Star had been very polite and refrained from interrupting as I worked through the story, but the moment I sent that message, she pounced.
starstar97: so the radiances knew and now youre out to them. and theyre supportive?
ezzen: Entirely. I know what you’re going to ask next, btw, about trying to get them to help research transition magic in an actual lab and the resources they’ve got. Idk yet.
starstar97: …
starstar97: i mean yeah i WAS gonna ask that but first i was gonna ask about your own plans for transition
ezzen: oh
I hadn’t actually given that any thought—I didn’t even know what my ideal form was, let alone how I’d get there. Star was light-years ahead of me.
starstar97: do they prescribe estrogen over there? is it more of a DIY situation? no way todai couldn’t under-the-table you some, worst comes to worst
starstar97: wait
starstar97: holy shit
starstar97: EZTROGEN
ezzen: :\
starstar97: saving that one for when you come out to the chat in proper
starstar97: (no pressure though!)
ezzen: <3
ezzen: this is a lot
ezzen: Idk anything about transition. Does the word even apply here? All the changes I want can come from my Flame, I hope.
Whatever changes those were.
starstar97: can they
starstar97: thats good then
starstar97: and uhhh maybe you havent thought this far ahead yet buuuuuut
starstar97: whats the over/under on “radiance ezzen”? since you’ve kinda already gone through the gauntlet of a whole inferno event and a fight with them
starstar97: not saying you should identify as a girl and not enby, but uh. you said sapphire said trans radiances were on the table
starstar97: (did you ever figure out what she meant by that, historically?)
I had, but I couldn’t tell Star that. Hell, Hina could have meant either Alice or potentially Sky, and I could divulge neither.
ezzen: I think she was just pushing my buttons. She sniffed me out first.
Despite how close we’d become, I still found myself shuddering at that first encounter with the hyena. She’d clocked me immediately, I realized, in my totality—both transgender and transhuman. Also, the idea of Hina sniffing me in a more literal sense—
I received a ping from the main chat.
thanasen: @ezzen damn ez you’re actually really good looking what the heck
ezzen: huh
A moment later, the attached image loaded—a zoomed in image of my face from when Yuuka and I had made the tunnel.
thanasen: was curious about the hair so I checked some of the videos but even aside from that you’ve actually just got a great face
My heart stopped. Yeah, everyone had seen my hair, because it was impossible to miss the crazy orange even at a distance. But the cameras had also captured my face—shaven smooth, sure, but still immortalized on the internet. They’d seen my face, in detail. My anonymity had been destroyed in full.
They’d seen my face.
Visceral wrongness crashed through me, the same as when the barber’s shears had chopped off my hair. I hated my face; it had become slightly, barely more tolerable to me after I’d forcibly removed all the beard and moustache hair, but it was still wrong. It still didn’t feel like mine, and there was a heart-borne terror at the idea that anybody—everybody—would associate it with me.
The Radiances were one thing, trustworthy, safe, fellow flamebearers; even beyond Alice’s refleshing, they were all well-versed in the art of mask-making, what it meant to separate the private self from the public persona. They had made it literal with their mantles. I had implicitly extended the same grace to the various Todai employees I inevitably encountered in the halls; they were in on the masquerade too, in a lesser sense. But something in me screamed at the idea of being exposed so completely to the world at large, to the masses who would see the meat I called a face and label it Ezzen when it was not.
I needed to cover it up, to replace it with something else, something that was correctly me, the version of me that was right.
My eyes slid back from my second monitor to my first, to the diagram of an entire LM projection of a human body splayed out before me, a fully customizable facsimile. No need for awful, spur-of-the-moment, horrifically bloody and painful sanguimancy this time; I could design the perfect shell, re-establish the distance, the right way, the way I was good at, through lattice-manifest and ingenuity, until the cameras would capture how I ought to look.
I needed to make a mantle.
Author’s Note:
Just a hallucination after all.
Right?
Otherwise a very magic- and gender-heavy chapter, and our first time in the chatroom in a good while! Those of you who have been asking for more complete definitions of the ripple colors and what they do, eat your heart out.
This week’s Radiance poster by Mjeow is of Ai! As a reminder, these artworks are from an in-universe photoshoot for Todai PR, not necessarily depictions of the girls as we and Ezzen are familiar with them. So these are canon but not necessarily their default looks; that cutting insert necklace Ai is wearing is just a prop, for example, and not too much of her work involves her personally using a big ol’ open-ended wrench like this one.
That’s all for this week. As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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The next day, Alice finally found the time to sit me down and debrief the events of the Barbecue Inferno. It was a pale day; the clear and cloudless February sky held nothing to occlude the sunlight as it washed the Tokyo skyline into harsh, neutral off-whites, spilling through the east-facing window of the penthouse’s meeting room and onto the table, bright enough to overwhelm the warmer LED bulbs overhead.
The weather was similar to four days ago, when I’d gone to Yoyogi Park and everything had gone wrong. My phone said the temperature was roughly the same too. This time, though, instead of being shielded from the chill by a reality alteration field of incredible breadth and potency, it was the simple floor-to-ceiling windowpanes, a mundane barrier manifested from Todai’s money rather than Hikanome’s Flame.
Alice had called me in for a general review of that day’s events, but I was impatient to find a moment for my own objective: convince Alice that it was a good idea for Hina and I to go hunting together.
“For what it’s worth, I think you did great,” Alice declared.
I shifted in my chair, tracing my burn scars and savoring the warm sun, such a far cry from the abyssal cold. “Uh. Yeah, I guess.”
This debrief saw neither of us at our best; even with her first full night of sleep in four days, Alice still looked a little haggard, and I was still nowhere near a hundred percent. I’d practically collapsed into Amane’s padded chair after being summoned by the Radiances’ leader. I rubbed my nose, which made Alice smile.
“No, really. Both for the scheduled stuff and the crisis management, I’m really happy with you. Amane says you handled Hikanome’s introduction well. And the…well, not quite an argument…debate about the Spire was good enough. Shows you believe in something enough to stand up for it; they care a lot about that. I think you made a good impression.”
“…But?” I wanted her to hurry up.
“No but. You did well, really!” She nodded to emphasize the statement, faltering slightly as her eyes scanned down her laptop’s screen. “Well, we do have some notes for you, but nothing you won’t expect.”
“Notes?”
“Um…well, nothing important enough for us to talk about now. It’s already in your email, actually.”
A new email, a lighthouse.co.jp address they’d provided me in the rush to settle me in prior to my appearance at the festival. I’d actually already had a contact email, but they’d insisted I also have a second one for official communications. I shrank in embarrassment as I remembered I hadn’t been checking it even before the barbecue—nor my usual one, which now surely had hundreds of communiques piled up from fellow academics. Both accounts had slipped through the cracks—work I’d be putting off even further in favor of self-indulgent, bloody activities with Hina.
If I could find a moment to bring it up, that was, and Alice wasn’t giving me an opportunity.
“Don’t worry,” she insisted, mistaking my nervousness for one of my countless other forms of discomfort. “What’s much more important is what happens from now, yeah?”
I nodded. Was this my moment to bring it up? I looked down at my hands, building up the courage.
Before I could commit to it, she went on, sitting forward intently. Her voice changed, a little more hesitant and careful. “The big thing is that although you did great, Hina…”
“Did not,” I finished, drumming a scarred finger on the table with annoyance that I’d hesitated. I tried to segue into my pitch. “No—no need to tiptoe around it with me. I know she fucked up, and she’s got to make it right.” I took a breath. “I’m—”
“Hm!”
Alice’s monosyllabic interruption made me raise my eyes; her eyebrows had gone up. She seemed surprised. “I’m—yes. Yes. Yeah.” She sighed. “It’s honestly quite a relief to hear we’re aligned on that already. After Yuuka said you didn’t end up breaking up…”
I grimaced apologetically. What had been intended as a breakup had instead only redoubled whatever sort of strange bond I had with the sapphire-eyed girl, and Yuuka had not been happy in the slightest to find I was remaining a monsterfucker. But at least I was trying to help keep her accountable—shouldn’t that count for something in even the crystalline, vindictive eye of Heliotrope?
It counted with Opal, at least. She scrolled her laptop with one hand and rubbed her forehead with the other, trying to find her new talk track from her notes now that she knew she didn’t have to convince me of Hina’s guilt. Her eyes glittered beautifully in the sunlight, and I was momentarily caught off guard by just how pretty she was. They were all good-looking, but Alice’s face was practically sculpted—no, literally sculpted, by her Flame, into her image of her ideal self. With some dragon bits regrettably stapled on.
Facial beauty aside, Alice was also…hot. It had somehow become more uncomfortable to admit that to myself now—was I just attracted in the normal sense, or was I really feeling envy? The soup of desire-like feelings was so hard to suss out, even now that I knew the latter option was there. Neither possibility made it right for my eyes to slide down to her chest, though, and I quickly averted my gaze toward the window again.
That was another opportunity wasted by distractions. Alice was the one to fill the silence.
“They want a public apology from her.”
“Yeah. You said that, I think. Yesterday.” I cleared my throat, impatience battling with the more practical need to know what else Hina had to get done to clear her image in the eyes of both Hikanome and her teammates. “Um. That’s it? No new laws or fines or anything?”
I’d known Hina’s actions would have repercussions for her and Todai, of course, but the exact nature was quite murky. When we’d visited Tochou, Alice had hinted that Hikanome could exert significant pressure over them—a public apology seemed awfully light. Admittedly, Todai was in a bit of an odd spot legally; most VNT groups of Todai’s caliber were either more tightly controlled by whatever nation they belonged to, were quasi-religious ‘outside the law’ cults like Hikanome, or were more like states or fiefs in themselves.
Alice shook her head. “Well, I think you already know we’re paying for the damage to the park…and we’re also footing the bill for treatment for those affected by ripple sickness or more direct injury, to the tune of…” her eyes scanned down the spreadsheet. I wanted her to get on with it, even though I was the one who’d asked for details. “We’re still doing spreadsheets for the exact amount. Three or four billion yen, I’d say, to be paid out over the next thirty years. Technically it’s just a big donation to FVI, but I expect Ai will want to be a bit more hands-on in helping out.”
“FVI?”
“Foundation for Victims of Infernos. They’re like the Asian version of the PARC.”
“Ah.” I understood it when she phrased it like that; the PCTF’s Paranatural Aid and Relief Committee was the organization that had paid my welfare and provided my housing in Bristol.
As for the number, I whipped out my phone to convert to a currency I knew, but Alice preempted me.
“Twenty-five million dollars.”
“Jesus.” That was a mind-boggling amount of money to associate with the magical girl sitting across from me. Not much for a major corporation—technically nonprofit in Lighthouse’s case—but it was all effectively Alice’s money, since the others had little interest in the bookkeeping. The casualness with which she tossed around that kind of sum reminded me of just how powerful she was even in a non-magical sense. I spared another glance out the window, reflecting that it was funny how some of the most powerful people in the country lived in a 20-story building and not the 60- or 80-story behemoths surrounding us. An attempt to be humble, maybe. The Vaetna held no such pretensions.
But then, they were the Vaetna.
Alice shrugged when she realized I wasn’t going to continue from my interjection. “It’s the right thing to do. And that’s not all, of course. We’re paying for damages to the park itself—think I said that yesterday—and probably going to bankroll Hikanome’s next similar event. Which isn’t great for our image,” she added as an aside. “But, er, none of this really affects you, I just wanted to assure you that you did well and all of this isn’t your fault. You did commendably before everything turned to shit and made a huge difference after.”
“Even though I was the target and this wouldn’t have happened without me there in the first place.” I couldn’t help but be a little frustrated. I should have called Hina off, or at least checked in with her or something. It was nice to be praised for how I’d done before then, but honestly, that had all taken a backseat in my mind compared to everything that had resulted from what Hina had done. How had the day even begun? I’d been pink and itchy from my impulsive and ill-advised—though still totally worth it—magical epilation, and I’d been confounded by the air temperature bubble, and then Hikanome’s leaders had decided to ambush me—
My thoughts slammed to a halt and my breath caught in my chest as my idle, skimmed recollections of the pre-inferno barbecue brushed up against something I’d somehow almost forgotten.
“My dad. Uh—did I tell you about that?”
“Oh.” Alice blinked, scrolling with the mousepad. “You did, yes. On the phone. But there were bigger matters at the time. You said Miyoko offered necromancy?”
“I don’t… really know what she offered,” I admitted, feeling unsteady. I starkly remembered the disorienting discomfort of the strange space behind her eyes—seriously, what was it with flamebearers and eyes?—but I was having trouble recalling the exact details the trio had given, if any. “His ghost. To learn more about my flamefall. But it’s bullshit, right?”
Necromancy wasn’t real, not in any meaningful sense. It had been demonstrated that bodies could be animated with magitech, but that was just the magical equivalent of making muscles twitch with an electrode, not resurrection, not something with a soul. The idea of a soul in the age of magic was itself a subject of intense debate, and I even privately believed that there was something of the sort, the place where the Flame met its bearer, but the idea that Miyoko could pull my father’s essence back from whatever great beyond it had gone to was still farfetched. And horrifying.
Alice took an uncomfortably long time to answer. She leaned back in her chair and swiveled away from her laptop, turning to face the blindingly bright window and looking out at the skyline. East, I realized, based on the late morning sun.
“Hard to see it in daylight,” she muttered.
East was Tokyo Bay, and in the sky above it, the scar, the grave of where Todai had once fought a Hikanome necromancer.
“Hongo’s…sister?” I recalled dimly. “Failed to bring back her husband. Though ‘failed’ implies there was ever any chance of success. Which there…?”
“Is.” Alice breathed, more grave and careful than a sigh. She turned back toward me, the end of her tail making a soft hiss as it slid along the hardwood. “It’s—Ezzen, you told me when you agreed to join up that you wanted to understand what happened to your father. Miyoko will have answers. Maybe not the right ones.”
My skin crawled. “…You’re not saying it’s bullshit.”
Alice rubbed her face with a hand. No nail polish—too busy, I assumed. She looked at me intently. “I don’t have the energy for this conversation, and I’m honestly not the right person for it. I’ll…when things are a little less stormy, I’ll gather everybody and we’ll have an honest debate about the existence of the soul.” She said it lightly, almost a joke, but there was something uncomfortable in her voice. Her eyes fled back down to her laptop. “More to the point, I’m so sorry they got the jump on you and isolated you like that.”
“Uh. Oh, yeah,” I recalled, accepting the topic change. Whatever Alice was insinuating, it sounded heavy, and I’d had more than enough of difficult conversations in the past 24 hours. “How’d they do that, anyway? Pull the other people out of the car without me noticing?”
I’d almost forgotten that Hikanome’s leaders had isolated me for my audience with them; it had sort of slipped through the cracks since the rest of that day had turned out so insane.
Alice shrugged. “We don’t know exactly. It’s not their first time doing it—but they should know better than to do it to one of us,” she growled. Her brow furrowed. “But Yuuka wasn’t mad about it, I’m told?”
“Uh. No?” Not that I recalled, at least. A little vexed at most.
“Hm. Odd.” Alice typed something into her notes before her fiery irises looked back up at me. Her expression softened from tense and analytical to something gentler. “She’s got a bit of a complex about abductions, especially regarding Hikanome. I’d have thought she’d raise more fuss.”
“Maybe because she doesn’t like me,” I mused aloud.
Alice paused and stared at me. “She likes you a good deal, Ezzen.”
“What?”
My reply made Alice look very tired. “Take my word for it. Back on track,” she waved the topic away, “it sounds like you’re not too rattled about it, either?”
“I’m fine,” I confirmed hurriedly. But even as my mouth moved, a tangential idea was forming. “Wait, if Yuuka should be mad about that, shouldn’t Amane be furious? Being the actual subject of the abduction that kicked all of this off?”
Alice’s shoulders slumped, and I realized I’d stepped on a bit of a landmine. “She’s good at being angry quietly. Let’s just—listen, if you’re fine, then it’s water under the bridge. It has to be, because we’re not really in a position to demand an apology right now.”
“Okay.” After a moment of awkward silence, I added, “Sorry.”
“No worries. As for the offer they made regarding your father—anything else we should know? Timeline? Conditions?”
“Uh.” I racked my brain. The whole encounter felt a bit hazy and dreamlike in retrospect; perhaps that was a clue as to how they’d accomplished it in the first place, and why I’d nearly forgotten it despite how sharp of an emotional punch it had been, both then and just now. “They wanted an answer in…ten days? Though, er, that was before all the stuff with Hina and Takagiri. So I don’t know if that’s changed. Oh, and it was what they wanted in exchange for support against the PCTF.”
Alice nodded as she noted it down. “Bugger. Yeah. You’re going to have to go, if you’re willing.” She raised her eyes to me briefly and I nodded. “Let’s assume the date hasn’t changed, but it’s definitely not the top priority with them right now.”
This was my chance to bring up what I’d discussed with Hina. “Finding Sugawara.”
Alice sat up, squaring her shoulders and looking regal. She met my gaze. “And putting him in the ground.”
I blinked, surprised by the agreement and open declaration of violence. I’d said much the same thing to Hina, but that was Hina, and I’d come into this conversation expecting Alice to preach moderation and realpolitik. But Alice didn’t even sound resigned—there was a determined edge to her voice. She’d abetted our crime at Thunder Horse two weeks ago, after all. Mahou shoujo destroy evil.
That made this so much easier.
“Um, yeah, I agree,” I began, trying to find my footing for the script I’d written in my head. “I mean it just makes sense, right? It’s free real estate when it comes to clearing the air with Hikanome, but even if it weren’t, we’ve got Takagiri’s condition—what Yuuka and Ai put together is really just a stopgap until we at least have him in custody to understand how to break their connection, but that’s sort of half-assing it, isn’t it, because we could just instead kill the fucker and be done with it, right, and there’s also those two missing guys you sent, which let’s face it, probably means they’re already dead, but on the off chance they’re not, we should really go in guns blazing—and, um, Hina and I messed up by keeping my stalker—er, Takagiri—from you and we shouldn’t have, and so we wanted your permission to go after him this time, all above-board, which in hindsight doesn’t really seem necessary now that—hurk—”
“Ezzen! Breathe,” Alice laughed, unable to hold her composure entirely. “Yes, yes, we’re in complete agreement. Save the oxygen,” she giggled. “We’re going after Sugawara, that’s not in question. Hina especially—everyone involved knows she’d do it anyway, with or without permission.”
“Yeah, I meant—” I took another breath, “I meant that we wouldn’t do it without permission. That’s an—an agreement we came to. Yesterday.”
“Mm. When you were supposed to break up, supposedly.” Her voice was non-accusatory, even friendly, and I couldn’t really tell if she was upset or not. “Got her on a leash now, have you?”
“…Yeah.” I didn’t have a defense for that one.
“Thank fuck,” she sighed, then reflexively covered her mouth. “Oops.”
My brow furrowed slightly. I’d heard her curse worse, for one, but also, we were in the middle of planning a murder. That that was less of a violation of her personal code than simple profanity was interesting—and so was the reaction in the first place.
“That bad?”
She sighed. “It’s—well, after something like that inferno, I figured you were either done—with her or with us—or you were really stuck in it now. And I figured the only way you were going to stick around was if you found some leverage over Hina. Glad to see I was right. Last time was Jason, and he just left.”
“Ah.”
“But you’re staying. And you want to be on the front lines now, do you?”
“Well—I can’t much keep her on a leash if I’m not actually there when it counts, can I?”
Alice’s eyes narrowed, and her teeth flashed in a grin, more devious than her usual sunny, polite smiles. “If you want to hunt with her, you can just say it.”
I froze, then sighed.
“Oh my God, yes, thank you,” I admitted. Despite my lengthy ramble, I hadn’t been able to find the courage to phrase it like that. But that was silly—I’d come into this conversation expecting to have to make this pitch to Alice Takehara, the leader of Todai as a political entity, but she was also Radiance Opal, the paramilitary magical girl squad leader and Alice, Hina’s best friend. Of course she was both agreeing to it and reading the intentions behind it accurately. I still felt the need to justify myself, though. “I just—I want to help. I ought to.”
“And we welcome your support. But you’re hardly fit for active duty yet, are you?” She raised a hand and began to count on her fingers. “In the span of twenty-four hours, you ripped all the hair off your skin, got caught in the center of an inferno, overloaded on green ripple, and had a little jaunt through the beyond where you almost froze to death. Plus you’re not even on your final prosthetic yet. And that’s just your physical condition—pardon me for saying so, Ezzen, but you’d not be magically prepared for direct combat even at full physical health. No mantle, no snapweaving.”
“I rewove my foot’s {AFFIX},” I pointed out, but it was a poor shield from the truth; she was right, I wasn’t equipped to go out and inflict bloody retribution in the tradition of the Vaetna. I sighed. “I’m probably better off just sticking around and helping from the chair, eh?”
She nodded. “Right on. I’m not ethically opposed to sending you out there when you’re ready, if that’s what you want, but for going straight after Sugawara, getting our people back, all that? Leave it to your girlfriend; she’s a lot less squishy than you.”
“But she still needs supervision…”
“You don’t need to be right there with her to hold her leash,” Alice chided, smiling. “We’ll send someone with her—Yuuka, hopefully myself as well if I don’t get tied up. And we’re going to move fast—it’ll be tonight, once Hina makes her public apology and Yuuka’s out of classes.”
“Not…right now?”
“Life takes precedence, Ezzen” she sighed. “Doing it today is already rushing it. I want to make sure we’re on the same page as Hikanome first, and honestly, the difference between doing it now and twelve hours from now is pretty minor. I doubt he’s even in that hospital anymore, or Yokohama at all.” She rubbed her forehead. “As for you: help us prep, stay here, hold down the fort. We’ve got several things you could help with today. Do you feel up to it?”
A little nugget of annoyance sprouted in my chest. I’d made it abundantly clear I wanted to help and didn’t need to be babied. I met her eyes with a nod. “Sure.”
“Great. The biggest thing is that Hina, Yuuka, Amane, and Takagiri’s mantles are all wrecked. I’ve got slightly different tasks for you with each of them.”
“Hina’s, too? Oh,” I realized. “Right.”
“Shorn apart when she did her idiotic dive-pounce-thing, as you recall.”
I winced. Yeah, I recalled; the way she’d dyed the entire world blue for a moment wasn’t something to be forgotten easily. “Does she even need it?” I mused aloud. “What with the strength and speed and healing factor? She did fine without it for all of the actual fighting.”
“Not necessarily,” Alice agreed, “so she’s the lowest priority, and probably doesn’t need your help. I’m sure she wants it, though.” She accompanied that with a wink before going on. “But Yuuka does need hers, and it was mangled by Takagiri’s sword. I want you to figure out how that happened, help her repair it, and patch that vulnerability. If there are more blades like that—and I’d bet there are—I want us to not be instantly incapacitated by them this time. Takagiri should be able to help there, of course, if she’s…lucid.”
Takagiri was coming up on her fifth day without sleep.
I nodded nervously. “Uh, yeah. Shouldn’t be too hard even if she’s not; we’ve still got one of the swords and all. How’s she?”
“Not great. Clock’s ticking, but the coffin’s Ai’s job.”
The coffin was a euphemism for the box Ai had pulled out of storage on Yuuka’s recommendation. It was leftover tech from right after Amane’s rescue, back when her red ripple sensitivity had been off the charts and they’d needed to be able to isolate her. With my help, Yuuka had foreseen yesterday that the device—little more than some basic life support and a whole lot of high-power red wards—could be adapted to help shield Takagiri from Sugawara’s nighttime soul-incursions and thereby give her the chance to sleep unmolested.
Ai had been working on modifying it since yesterday—pulling an all-nighter herself, apparently, which I would have joined in had my healing-exhaustion not caught up to me soon after my conversation with Hina. I had been intending to go help her finish it up after I was done here with Alice, but now it sounded like I had other work to do.
“Bit of a grim name, isn’t it?”
“For grim purpose,” Alice conceded. “But like I said, leave that to Ai. As for your part in helping our guest…her mantle was completely obliterated.” She rubbed her forehead again, clearly unhappy with that outcome given what we had learned about our opponent barely two minutes after that. “Obviously, I eventually want you to get it back up and running—she looks miserable in the old guy body, and I can’t imagine that’s helping her mental state. But more pertinently, she can do independent piloting. I’d love to know how.”
“What about the bomb?”
“What about the bomb?” Alice sighed. “We don’t know if it’s even in there. If you do find something attached to her soul, some last-resort horror Sugawara cooked up, then we’ll stop and reassess.”
“Okay. Uh…to recap, fix Hina and Yuuka’s mantles and get a schematic for Takagiri’s.”
“Yes,” she grinned, apparently pleased with my basic recollection. “This is all in your email too,” she added as a not-so-subtle reminder; I winced a little. She glanced down at her own notes again. “I think that pretty much covers it. Uh, Amane’s mantle needs some reconstruction too, and while I’m sure she’s more than capable of dealing with it herself, lend her a helping hand if she asks, would you?”
Something that sounded like resentment had snuck into her voice near the end there; frustration with her girlfriend’s stubbornness? She reached up and touched her forehead yet again, wincing. Always the same place.
Alice caught the direction of my eyes and lowered her hand hurriedly. “Just a migraine.”
“Uh huh,” I replied, an unpleasant theory beginning to form. “You didn’t wind up getting any more dragon-ka, did you? Um—as long as we’re talking about dealing with it yourself,” I explained. “I did offer to help.”
“Nothing,” she said. “If I have a problem, you’d know. Sort of hard to hide the tail getting longer, heh,” she chuckled mirthlessly.
“I meant…horns,” I clarified, tapping my own forehead in the same place she’d been touching.
Alice stared at me. “No. Nope. Not happening. Nope.” She twitched. “You’ve got a lot more urgent stuff on your plate, so just—don’t worry about me, alright?”
“Are you sure—”
“Really, Ezzen, it’s so nice of you to be concerned, but there’s really much higher priority things going on.” She stood abruptly, slamming the laptop closed. “And we’re out of time for now, anyway—I’ve got to run off to meet with Shibuya’s mayor.” She power walked past me and out the door, leaving me alone.
I frowned slightly at Alice’s retreating form as she exited the room. The glimmer of her tail’s scales shifted from reflecting the greyish blues of the outside sky to the warmer indoor lights as she went down the hall. I squinted past the twinkle and tried to assess the draconic limb as a whole, deciding it looked no more massive than usual; I believed her on that front. I just didn’t trust that she’d not undergone any additional transformations from the magic she’d done during the inferno—Yuuka had certainly been worried when she’d punched the tunnel open, and if the precog had concerns, so did I. It stood to reason that Alice’s Flame was lining her up for horns of some sort. Those were plenty draconic, weren’t they?
I hoped I was wrong, of course—more stress was the last thing she needed. I felt bad for even bringing it up, honestly; if I’d known it’d spook her so badly, I wouldn’t have said anything. Stupid. Should have waited for actual evidence.
I tried to put it out of my mind as I lurched to my feet. Foot and a half, really; in theory, I was due to go through the prosthetic designs Ai’s underlings had whipped up, but neither she nor I had the time right now, and honestly, I was much more looking forward to getting some glyphcraft done. Even though I wasn’t going to come along with tonight’s operation, I still had my own part to play, magic to work, mantles to upgrade—starting by reverse engineering Takagiri’s swords.
Thankfully, Takagiri herself was lucid after all. She’d been staving off the ever-encroaching exhaustion by making herself useful, primarily with the coffin itself, but she’d also done me the kindness of actually mapping out how she’d made her swords sometime in the past few days.
We were in another basement room across the hall from Ai’s workshop, a few doors down from the prosthetic fitting room. This one was basically just a computer lab for Ai’s students, maybe thirty computers in three rows of ten. It was empty except for us.
“So it really is pink all the way through,” I muttered. “Hits the control circuitry directly, not the structure.”
“Yes. The parallel {RESONATE} pair here makes the…beginning? The entry on contact.”
“And from there it does a few {INFERENCES}, yeah, and then just hits…” I glanced over at the diagram for Yuuka’s mantle I’d pulled up on the screen. “This part, right? The {ALIGN} before the control manifold. Throws everything out of sync, and then it hits the manifold and…what, crashes the motive connection? Oh, but there’s fallbacks…which don’t land,” I decided, trying to follow the chain of execution in my head. “Or rather, they do kick in, but the gyro module is already done for, so they get the wrong data.” I squinted. “That doesn’t look right.”
“Because it’s not,” Takagiri confirmed, pacing back and forth carefully. She said it helped her stay awake, and who was I to contest that? Her motions were a little jerky and delayed; she looked so bad that it dismissed any residual danger I might have felt around her. She was old and beyond exhausted; in no position to hurt anybody even if she wanted to. But her focus hadn’t wavered, and her voice was steady as she explained. “The gyroscope portion of the manifold leaks pink. Not normally enough to matter, but enough for the sword to overload it. If you fix that, the sword would only cause a momentary interruption.”
I was impressed by her English, at least for this highly technical stuff. I supposed it made sense that if most of the Radiances were fluent in the vocabulary necessary to upgrade, operate, and repair their mantles, then so was she, having effectively copied the design. Maybe it made sense especially for her, since it was—had been—her lifeline to what she considered her true body. How much had she upgraded it, beyond the dual-piloting capability we’d already seen?
“Oh, the gyro. That’s why Yuuka, uh, fell over, and then the control circuitry was all fucked. You’ve already got the fix in your own mantle?”
She nodded. “I just routed the free ripple into {SEVER}. I’m sorry I haven’t recreated the diagrams for the whole mantle. I think if I sit down in front of GWalk for too long, I’ll fall asleep.” As if by nervous tic, she prodded at a patch on her arm—a caffeine drip—fussing with it as if worried the adhesive would come off.
I didn’t really know what to say to that. “Uh. Okay. Yeah, {SEVER} should work,” I affirmed, as I glanced over the diagram of Yuuka’s mantle. If it worked in Takagiri’s, it was good enough for at least this quick patch. “You copied theirs just from observation?” Takagiri didn’t respond, and I looked over at her. “Takagiri?”
She blinked and pressed the patch against her arm more strongly. “Hai—yes.”
“Insane.”
I meant it as a compliment, but she frowned. “I know it’s not normal.”
“Uh—no, I meant I’m impressed,” I clarified. Maybe not the best phrasing to use with somebody slowly losing their grip on reality. “Like, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Maybe a shitty copy of the basic functionality, but not to the same quality, and definitely not with the upgrades you made. It’s not…well, I don’t think ‘normal’ plays into it at all, really. You want what you want, yeah? And from this…you must have wanted it really badly. I—I get that.”
Her eyebrows went up. “You do?”
“Yeah, I mean, like, remaking yourself in the image of something more.”
“Like the Radiances.”
I twitched. “Uh…no. Sorta? But it’s like—not the way you do, I think. The things they’ve got that appeal to me are the things they share with the Vaetna.”
“Not their beauty?”
That brought me to a total halt. “I, uh. I guess? I mean, everybody wants to be attractive, right, and I don’t think most people would mind looking like them.” This was a distinctly uncomfortable topic for me, of course, with how much I tried not to think about how pretty my flatmates were. Even after over a week of acclimating to them, I’d still failed to stop my eyes from wandering between Alice’s most attractive features earlier.
Takagiri paused her pacing and gave me a Look; something between mirth, exasperation, and empathy. She shook her head slowly and emphatically. “No, Ezzen-san, not most people.”
“Oh.” Oh no. “Really?”
“Really. I’m very jealous of them.” She ran her hand over her mouth and flinched at the stubble on her body’s male face. It squeezed my heart. “I made my mantle, let Sugawara do…what he did to me, because I want what they have. The beauty, the youth, the freedom, the…woman-ness. Is there a word for that?”
“Femininity?”
“Femini—femininity,” she repeated, working her way over the repetitious syllables. “Ah, yes, that makes sense. But you came to them without wanting that? Or without knowing you wanted that?”
“I mean, I didn’t have much choice in it.”
“You chose to stay.”
“…Point.” I didn’t like this conversation. “Uh—so just fix the pink leak on the gyro, and your swords—or copies, which I’m assuming Sugawara’s dudes have access to, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation—won’t fuck with the mantles?” I looked at the diagram again. “Well, wouldn’t break them. There’s still the interrupt. Maybe the control circuit needs sheathing.”
“It does. You’re avoiding.”
“Avoiding talking about…gender stuff with you? Being trans? That’s ‘cause—we’re not in the same situation. You want to be like them, sure, that’s your prerogative, but don’t assume I’m the same.”
She raised her hands apologetically. “My mistake. I just thought you’d understand.”
And maybe I did. Maybe I knew exactly what she was talking about. But I didn’t want to talk about it with her—I was far more comfortable talking to the Radiances about this, because…I’d known them a few weeks longer? Just some implicit understanding that had come from living with them? Because they were visibly, irrefutably girls whereas Takagiri was wearing a male face right now? I kicked myself mentally for that last one.
“I…you’re sleep deprived and overreaching,” I declared, trying to separate myself from the conversation by pulling up Alice’s and Hina’s mantle diagrams alongside Yuuka’s to drown the topic under a flood of interesting stimuli for my magic-obsessed brain. “I don’t want to…get into all this until stuff has settled down more.”
I said that instead of “I don’t want to be friends,” which was a bridge too far, unfair, and a little mean. The diagram before me was evidence of her own genius at glyphcraft, and I could acknowledge that, and I did want her as a peer. But she was intruding on an emotional process I wasn’t ready to expose to anyone outside the gaggle of women who’d adopted me, not yet. Besides, she had tried to kill or abduct me a few days ago, and forgiveness only went so far.
Takagiri didn’t say anything in response. I turned to her again, wondering if she was having another sleep-deprived space-out moment—and jumped in my chair at her expression. Her eyes were fixed past me, over my shoulder, peeled wide open. There was terror etched into her face, deepening the lines of middle age into a rictus of awful recognition. My eyes followed her gaze, dragged along, dread and terror building as I saw she was gazing into a far corner, more dimly lit, away from the cold fluorescent lights in the center. From her expression, I was expecting to see a monster perched in that corner, staring us down. My tattoo itched in agreement, and something in the back of my mind was whispering to reach for my Flame, to be ready to snap into action. But there was nothing.
Wasn’t there?
“Takagiri,” I whispered urgently. “Do you see something?”
She said something in Japanese, muttering to herself, then switched to English. She didn’t take her eyes off the murky corner where nothing was. “He’s here.”
Author’s Note:
And we’re back! Thanks for your patience over the long hiatus. This is a bit of a recap chapter and setting the scene for this arc — I’m hoping for this one to be shorter than Arc 2. Ez and the girls have murder on the mind, and can you really blame them?
New thing: I’ve gotten a bunch of commissioned art done over the break (instead of getting an actual cover done for Arc 3, lol)! The first five chapters in this arc will each have a picture of one of the Radiances down here in the author’s note! The theme for these is that they’re official Todai photoshoots/posters, so this is the public’s image of them, not necessarily Ez’s. The first of these is Alice!
Art by Mjeow, who has done absolutely fantastic work on this whole series. View their portfolio and commission sheet here.
All the art in this series will also have textless versions, which I’ll put up somewhere on the site for if people want to download them, as well as some rad alternate versions that will stay Patreon-exclusive for now until I figure out what to do with them. If you’re interested in seeing these available as real, physical posters you can buy as merch, please say so in the comments or on the Discord — I’m interested in opening a shop for that sort of thing, but I won’t know if people are interested unless you say so. That’s it for these for this week!
Unfortunately lighthouse.co.jp is claimed by another company in our real-world timeline, so I can’t do any funny bits with it, like redirecting it here. Oh well.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter! We recruited three new betas over the break: Altrune, mirrormatch, and Enigma, and they’ve done a great job.
That’s all for this week! It’s great to be back. See you next Friday!
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!
Hello, readers! Welcome to another end-of-arc author’s note slash blog post slash postmortem slash peek behind the curtain. This time around, I want to talk a little about writing, and then we’ll get into what’s going to be happening during the hiatus and next arc. I’ll also be posting a writeup about the inspirations for various characters over on Patreon for supporters.
Announcement: Goodies!
Before anything else, I want to highlight that there’s a side story publicly available on the site/Patreon for when you’re done reading this AN. This is part of a larger paradigm shift regarding Patreon content; basically, everybody’s getting more stuff. The short version:
Side stories are becoming public! They’ll be posted publicly on the Patreon and the site. Right now, there’s just the one, but I hope to write another during the hiatus, and then one every few months going forward. There may still be some paywalled ones, but I’m gonna default to making them public.
Patreon backlog is increasing from one advance chapter to three starting next arc, and the price is staying the same if you sign up before May 1! That’s 15k-25k words of advance chapters for $5. After that point, the price will be $10, which is still a better deal than now.
Writing a webserial is hard. Sunspot posts one chapter a week (and I take every fourth week off), but they’re long chapters, 4000-10,000 words depending on the week. The total word count in this arc was 124,930, meaning the average word count per chapter was about 6,250 words. That’s a lot of words! Readers who come from other serials may observe that this is roughly half the weekly output of other authors like Hungry or Thundamoo, and only like a sixth of that of pirateaba, that monster of monsters.
This is something that sometimes weighs on me a bit—but then again, all of those writers have far more mileage under their belts, and are necessarily outliers to be as successful as they are. So I’m not too broken up about it. There’s a universe where Sunspot’s weekly wordcount goes up, or I start a second serial. But we’re a while off from either of those, I think—I’m busy! For example, this arc had a few interruptions in posting around 2.06 and 07; that’s because I was busy graduating from…a bunch of stuff, actually. Hopefully, I’m done doing that, because it was really quite a busy time. However, I continue to have Stuff To Do IRL, so it’s possible there’ll also be some interruptions in arc 3.
As I said, it’s hard. Writing at the pace I do is only really possible because of the beta readers. I thank them in every chapter for a reason—their incessant poking and prodding helps me maintain a reasonably steady input so I’m not just cramming for the deadline every week, and their insights into the story are invaluable. I truly could not write this story without their help. If you’re interested in joining the beta reader team, we’ll be recruiting 2-3 more during the hiatus via the Discord.
I’m still growing as a writer. Readers seem to think the back half of this arc was excellent overall, for which I’m very grateful, but I found the action scenes to be quite a challenge. There’s a lot of moving parts! I’ve learned a lot from it, though, and expect it to get easier moving forward. On the flip side, I think the weakest part of the arc was the slice-of-life sections in the first few chapters. I enjoy writing slower paced character stuff, and I’d like to think I’m good at it, but giving them strong momentum is something I’ve struggled with. I’ll do my best to polish that aspect of my writing in arc 3.
Overall, though, I’m really proud of myself for getting this arc done, and I’m blown away by the story’s growth over the five-ish months it took to get here. Between RR and Shub we’ve gained over a thousand followers! The ads I’ve been running on RR have also performed exceptionally well, which is awesome. And the Discord has been, to put it bluntly, popping off—370 members at time of writing is ludicrous relative to the follower count, and it’s been so, so rewarding to see a community form around this little story. The general story discussion, the theories, the live-reads, and especially the fanfic (yeah, we have fanfic now, what the hell) bring me so much joy to witness and participate in. It blows my mind to have fans, and I’m so very grateful.
The Hiatus
Sunspot is on break until at least May 1. I’ve got various IRL errands to deal with, a whole lot of story-related stuff to do, and then a bunch of backlog to write. Here’s some Sunspot stuff that’ll happen before Arc 3:
The Patreon restructuring mentioned above
The beta reader applications mentioned above
Probably one more side story
More website upgrades. We’re gonna add an RSS feed!
A Bluesky account for the story
I’m commissioning character art!
Arc 3 will be titled Threading The Needle. I’m a little embarrassed to say that there’s no new cover in the pipeline yet—I haven’t even picked an artist. If you have artist recommendations, by all means, send them my way!
That’s pretty much all from me for now. To recap: thanks for reading, check out the side story and consider joining the Patreon before prices go up on May 1. If you have questions or further thoughts about the story, I’m always around in the Discord, so don’t be afraid to start a conversation!
You’ve all heard it. You’ve all said it. An eight-kilometer-tall megastructure appearing out of the North Atlantic helmed by interventionist demigods is a threat to us all.
Of course, the phrase means different things depending on who you ask. The Spire should not exist, say the Consortium, because it is a physical impossibility. The Spire should not exist, says Washington, because the actions of the Vaetna threaten the very concept of international diplomacy. The Spire should not exist, say the Zero-Day nutters, because it should not be possible for ten people to rule a nation composed of tens of millions of refugees, plus dozens of flametouched, without mind control or at least the violence the Vaetna are so known for abroad. The Spire should not exist, say the billionaires to each other on their private islands, because it hurts the bottom line.
All of these are very valid reasons to not want the Spire to exist, which is why we have Eschaton; I’ll loop back around to that in a bit. But the fact remains: the Spire stands, and the world has had to adjust to its presence. In light of that, before getting to the meat of the matter, let me start this memo with a history lesson, because I know many of us try our hardest to not think about the Spire when we can help it, and it will help clarify the importance of PIR 5875 and the situation with V-06.
As early as three weeks after the Spire’s Raising at the end of the Firestorms, HUMINT operators from over a dozen NATO member states were sent amid the countless refugees, hoping to embed long-term and gain a better understanding of life on the inside, the Vaetna’s strategic capabilities, and the advanced magitech that allowed such a society to exist at all. It was assumed that such espionage would be necessary, because nobody could quite believe that the Vaetna’s purported transparency about these things was the full story. The preliminary reports justifying these espionage operations cited the Spire’s geographic isolation and tightly controlled modes of entry as a reason to suspect that there were far more sinister and totalitarian modes of governance at play, especially when taken together with the extreme violence of the Vaetna’s foreign policy.
Within six days, every operator was trivially flushed out, in some cases literally hoisted by the scruff of their necks. It was made abundantly clear they had been made from the moment they’d stepped through their respective Gates. The Vaetna claimed no hard feelings and personally returned each and every operative safely to the office of the leader of their respective agency. To those of you who were around for that, I need not recount how humiliating it was for us all.
The Vaetna then extended personal invitations to take a much more open look at the Spire, top to bottom.
So began the series of studies that would together become the United Nations Cultural and Economic Report on the Spire (UNCERS). These studies ran the gamut, from demographic and quality-of-life surveys of the various refugee cohorts that made up the population, to the technical details of the hydroponic systems used to feed them, to the systems of governance that maintained societal order. This report was concerned primarily with the Spire’s function as a refugee nation running on infrastructure quite literally created ex nihilo and was surprised to find at every turn that things just…worked.
The Spire has all the trappings of a post-scarcity society when it comes to the basic needs of its population. There is money, the suna, but it is reserved for luxury goods; housing, food, and basic household items are all provided. Housing is allotted to encourage different refugee blocs to mingle, though care is taken to not overly separate communities that arrived as a unit. Rations of staple ingredients and spices are distributed to every household, making best efforts to match to their cuisine, all grown from the hydroponic gardens.
The gardens are of note because they form the Spire’s economic backbone. Due to a near-total lack of traditional natural resources, the nation suffers from a critical deficit of raw materials. To combat this, the hydroponic gardens not only produce the nation’s food supply, but also engage in the magically accelerated production of renewable raw materials, especially wood, organic-derived polymers, and cotton for textiles. Metal is especially limited; where required for household objects and electrical systems, it is taken from automated shipbreaking operations on the south face. The Vaetna have displayed a strong preference for buying ships whole and dismantling them themselves or retrieving wrecks rather than buying scrap. Since the initial report, stoneware has also become common thanks to oceanic sediment mining operations within the Spire’s territory.
All of these materials are mostly for household use, and cannot be produced or synthesized in quantities sufficient for the sheer scale of the Spire’s physical infrastructure. For this, the Vaetna leverage the unique solution of lattice-manifest (LM) matter, deployed and integrated at a scale that remains unrivaled. This is thanks to their abundance of Flame energy; upper estimates put the Vaetna at 80% of the PCTF’s stock. Combined with their cutting-edge mastery of magical engineering, this has allowed the infrastructure of the Spire to operate with a labor force of essentially nil; maintenance of the Spire’s physical structure is carried out by the Vaetna themselves and various automated systems.
Thanks to this level of automation and social support, there is no expectation of labor for citizens. People are still permitted to work, and most pursue a craft or education thanks to the Spire’s aggressive poaching of academics worldwide. The 31 flamebearers taking asylum in the Spire at the time of the report did not yet have a clear role; there were loose expectations that they would contribute to the Vaetna’s magical research, but not to commit their Flame resources to infrastructure, and were otherwise treated as regular citizens. This has largely held true to today.
At the time of the UNCERS, it was unclear whether this social order would be sustainable, but thus far, it has stood the test of time, and the current strategic understanding is that there is little leverage to foment internal unrest even if operatives could be inserted without detection. By all accounts, the people of the Spire are happy, the society functions largely headlessly, and the nation enjoys a largely self-reliant economy with low dependence on strategically critical imports.
So, where’s the catch? As far as the UNCERS found, there isn’t one. Per the report, there were no secret sanguimantic engines to provide magical power and no draconian legal system to maintain social order. And, perhaps most tellingly, there have been no cases of the nation’s now 72 harbored flamebearers abusing their power, either in organized attempted coups or as the individual cases of megalomania or instability that seem nearly pathological among flamebearers on the outside.
Of course, it is entirely possible that the Vaetna are simply that good at deception or intimidation, and that there did or does indeed exist exploitation or a fatal flaw in the organization of the society, and we simply didn’t turn over the right stones. But as the years went on and further reports were filed, the initial report has been more and more validated; the Spire seems to be equipped for the long haul as a post-scarcity civilization helmed by the Vaetna, with no smoking guns to suggest otherwise (at least when it comes to their domestic policy; their foreign policy is beyond the scope of this memo).
The main takeaway from UNCERS and its subsequent reports has been that the Vaetna are the lynchpin of the Spire. Their magic quite literally forms its structure and automates so many of its operations that the people are near-redundant. And there are only ten of them.
This brings us to the classified strategic report appended to UNCERS, which was concerned with strategic weaknesses. It was determined that despite the Vaetna’s martial prowess, any attempt to destabilize the nation should target them over the Spire itself.
A successful operation would, at minimum, shake the public impression of their invincibility, and at best, take one out of commission in such a way that allows for their considerable quantities of Flame to be harvested. Taking out one-tenth of the Spire’s infrastructure would both sow internal unrest and weaken their overall military strength. If done in a way that could also allow for harvest, even a single Vaetna’s Flame resources would dramatically shift the global balance of power and set up the Task Force for new frontiers of paranatural research. Most importantly, though, it would hopefully cow the remaining Vaetna sufficiently to reduce their interventionism.
So that was the task: kill a Vaetna, or at least strike a meaningful blow against them. To this end, the Task Force established a classified unit, codenamed “Eschaton.” But despite the expenditure of considerable resources and impressive ingenuity, little progress has been made. Even the Vaetna’s most egregious blunders (Dubai, Jharkhand) have only served to underscore the absurd difficulty of actually bringing one down, and no plan has ever reached a stage where execution was considered. In July 2020, Eschaton estimated that another five years and $800B would be needed to crack the dermis alone.
The situation changed on 11 February 2022, and this brings us to the heart of this memo. At 0512 SST (0712 GMT), a standard-sequence flamefall (Ripple Emanator 1242) abruptly changed heading to launch itself directly at the Spire. It was intercepted by V-02 (“Heung”) and splintered into four segments, which dispersed to four hosts:
Dalton Colliot, United Kingdom (at large; see attached Paranatural Incident Report 5872 and collated documents on “Ezzen”, as well as Paranatural Actor of Interest 385 “Lighthouse”)
Noah Gaspard Holton, United States (at large; see attached PIRs 5873 and 5882 and further documents on the Thunder Horse Inferno)
Ana Baker, United States (contained; see attached PIR 5874 and further documents on PAI 554 “Zero-Day”)
Artek Konieczek, Poland (decohered; see attached PIR 5875)
Konieczek was a typical decoherence case and was safely eliminated with no casualties by V-06 (“Katya”) in the Polish countryside at 0544 SST, an entirely normal Vaetna response with their usual rapidity and cleanliness when it comes to standard-sequence flamefall. V-06 returned to the Spire without incident after.
Here’s where it gets interesting: her public appearances have dropped off a cliff since. She was present at her next scheduled event the following day, and has since then only been seen once, for a very brief and boilerplate press statement on the events of PIR 5875 on February 15. She has missed fourteen expected appearances between February 11 and the time of writing of this memo. Such absences are not completely unheard of, especially in the wake of Dubai, but it is highly atypical following such an utterly unremarkable inferno cleanup.
The current theory is that she was injured by Konieczek’s ripple emanations, despite how clean the kill was. The implications speak for themselves: a Vaetna being seemingly taken out of commission by a routine inferno control deployment is potentially world-shaking. It remains to be seen whether V-06 will suffer any sort of long term harm, but even if she doesn’t, this is the first recorded chink in the armor.
We have reason to believe that the other flamebearers carrying segments of RE 1242 may also have some quality to their Flame or its ripple emanations that have a deleterious effect on the Vaetna. At time of writing, this is speculative, but strongly corroborated by anomalous behavior documented in PIRs 5872 and 5873; in both cases, Vaetna were on the scene early enough to have complete priority over retrieval teams, but did not intervene. This is especially notable in the case of Colliot, where three(!!) were present but allowed a PAI 385 member to abscond with him rather than intervene, despite his status as a person of interest to both them and the Task Force. In the case of Holton, V-10 (“Brianna”) could have easily evacuated him off of the actively-burning Thunder Horse oil platform, and the fact that she did not is also anomalous.
Taken together, there is evidence that the Vaetna are wary of something about this flamefall cluster. This is the biggest lead Eschaton has had since its formation, and steps are now being taken to capitalize on this information.
Currently, the Task Force only has one member of this cluster in hand, Ana Baker, who entered custody willingly and has been cooperative. She is currently under care and observation at the Center for Paranatural Studies at Argonne Laboratories in Chicago, but plans are now underway to transfer her to Eschaton custody while further plans for testing are drawn up. She may be fit for field work; see the attached psychological report.
Eschaton also aims to retrieve both of the remaining members of the cluster. Holton was rescued from Thunder Horse by an unknown PAI and remains at large; resources are being diverted toward locating him. Colliot’s whereabouts are known with exactitude; he appears to be putting down roots with PAI 385, which complicates operations significantly. His status as a person of interest in paranatural engineering already made him worth diplomatic attempts to retrieve despite our thorny history with Lighthouse, but we are now diverting significantly more resources to guarantee his retrieval.
It would also be desirable to get Lighthouse themselves on an actual leash. They have consistently been a nuisance for Retrieval, and harboring Colliot in light of this new state of affairs is the last straw. February 19th’s “Barbecue Inferno” (PIR 5910) presents an opportunity for significant leverage in bringing them to heel. See attached documents on PAI 114 “Hikanome.”
To conclude, I’m very pleased to say that Eschaton finally has a chance of returning on its considerable investment, and that we already have a critical piece of the puzzle in hand. More concrete plans for analysis and retrieval to come by the end of February.
Adam Eckhart
NATO PCTF Subdirector of Retrieval Operations
Author’s Note:
Big end-of-arc Author’s Note available right here!
Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other Sunspot readers!
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I was caught off guard by how sudden and intense my desire was to leap out of bed and go to Hina. I was possessed of the urge, for just a moment, to flood my muscles with Flame enough to stand under my own power in spite of the egregious harm I’d already inflicted on them, to rip the intravenous needle from my arm heedless of the pain it would bring. She was hurting, and she needed me. I wanted to feel her touch, press my forehead against hers until she felt better, tangle our limbs together until our heartbeats matched—
Logic caught the urge by the scruff. What an absurd emotional response; pushing my body past its currently much-reduced limits was a terrible idea, especially because Hina definitely did not need me there that urgently. I did have to talk to her, but in the sense that we should talk, not the primal need I had just experienced. What a drug she was. But she could wait; I was in the middle of something here.
“It’s…fine,” I told the room, glaring slightly at Ebi in particular for apparently snooping on my text messages. “As for—what did you call it? Inscrutable egg mania? That has nothing to do with undoing whatever the fuck Sugawara did. It’s just the right thing to do.” Ebi’s perfectly controlled digital face betrayed nothing, so I shifted my gaze to Takagiri. “Say more. He only has access to what your mantle experiences? But we destroyed that, didn’t we? Before you even, uh, betrayed him. So even if he can still get that info from you next time you sleep, as far as he’s concerned, the last thing you were doing was trying to kill us, so all’s good—no betrayal, no need for blackmail or explosion. Right?”
Takagiri made a soft, choked sound, and I realized my mistake in casually bringing up the destruction of her mantle like that. In all practical senses, the construct was her proper body, her ideal form, and without it, she was trapped in the flesh of a balding samurai. My own dysphoria—which I was still coming to terms with labeling as such—must have paled in comparison. Regret and awkwardness made my stomach twist as I watched her take a breath and blink away the trauma we’d inflicted on her, straightening up to meet my eyes.
“It is not just my experiences. It is also knowledge, thoughts, feelings. He will know what I have done. It is all—his.”
Her voice broke in that horrible way, the sound of violation and despair and terror. It tore at my heart. I had to help her, to free her from this—while my mind raced, Yuuka stood from her chair and crossed the room toward her. Despite Takagiri’s currently masculine body, the misandrist Heliotrope Radiance showed no revulsion, and instead, gently touched the woman’s arm, speaking more softly than I’d ever heard her. I couldn’t understand the Japanese, but from the tender tone and steady voice I knew she was talking down her former enemy from the verge of a panic attack.
If only I could be half as helpful. My bedside manner was shit; I was not equipped for this the way Yuuka was. For all her abrasiveness, she was also Amane’s best friend, fiercely loyal, and so knew how to gently guide somebody out of the long shadows of cruelty and abuse. I couldn’t do the same; my job was to fix the larger magical crisis. But Ai had already been working Takagiri’s no-sleep problem for two days straight—and was probably therefore running on fumes herself by now—and I doubted there was anything I could come up with in these next few moments that she hadn’t already ruled out with all her genius and software and instrumentation.
So that left me stuck. Maybe I actually was better off just trusting that the Radiances would see Takagiri through this nightmare, and my time would be better spent having the dreaded talk with Hina? I ran through what Takagiri had said, the particular nature of how she was trapped. We weren’t in a position to defuse the literal bomb attached to her Flame, or the metaphorical one that was the blackmail, so all we had to do for now was just find a way to let her get some sleep without letting Sugawara into her head. And with her mantle destroyed, that might already be the case—the issue was that we couldn’t take that risk.
And when I thought of it like that, I had it.
“Yuuka.”
She turned back to me. “Ezza.”
“Taking risks is stupid. Can’t we just check the future? See whether any information transfer would actually take place if she went to sleep?”
Yuuka froze. Her mouth worked, as though she were searching for words and discarding everything she found, until eventually her shoulders slumped. “You dipshit.”
“What? Does it not work?”
“Fuck,” Ebi groaned. “You said that in front of a data conduit straight to Sugawara.”
The beeping of my heart monitor accelerated again. “Oh. Oh shit. Fuck, right, opsec, sorry—”
“It’s…whatever,” Yuuka decided. “The whole point is to make sure he can’t get in her head anyway. Stop shaking. Actually—Ebi?”
“Yeah, on it.” The android snapped her slender, carbon-fiber fingers, and the beeping went silent.
I took a deep breath. “Sorry. I should know better.”
“You should, but it’s fine.” Yuuka shrugged. “I mean, she already knows about Ebi, and that’s a hell of a cat to be letting out of the bag.”
“And we already suspected that your power was yochi,” Takagiri put in.
“There ya have it,” Yuuka sighed. “As for the idea—yeah, let’s do it. I’m not getting any good signal about how it’d turn out right now, but if you do the Statue of Liberty thing, I bet it’ll work.”
I resisted the urge to ask why she couldn’t go down the chain of events to see the hypothetical silver ripple exposed by my Flame’s illumination via the silver she could see now—probably just too noisy, I guessed. It’d be decoherent mush rather than anything resembling useful information. That was an obvious candidate to improve upon, though; if we were to reverse engineer exactly how her eye worked and give it some proper testing—
While the magic-enjoying part of my mind was chewing on that, Ebi was yelling.
“No open Flame! Not when we’ve got Amethyst on critical alert down the hall. I can’t believe I have to tell you of all people that’s a shit fucking idea, miss best friend.”
Yuuka made an annoyed sound. “I know exactly how bad of an idea it is—it’s not, and it’s worth it. She’ll agree. She’d say so herself if she were up.”
“And she is not here to consent to it, bitchface.”
“Go wake her up and ask her yourself, then.”
“Uh,” I broke in. “If it’s that much of a concern, can’t we just take this somewhere a bit further from her? Down to the…”
I trailed off before I could blurt out “the ripple-shielded room in the basement.” I wasn’t sure it was classified per se, but I had set myself on edge with my previous fuckup. Takagiri raised her eyebrows anyway as Yuuka shook her head.
“Nah, moving you or her is a pain in the arse. Ebi, if you’re that worried, go on over to her and have the TXA ready. It’ll only take a sec.”
“Don’t fucking tell me how to do my job,” Ebi spat, but to my surprise, she stomped out the door rather than argue further—insofar as an android without real feet could stomp, anyway. It was more like angry clicking that receded down the hall.
Takagiri looked guilty. “That is also my shame. That Ishikawa-chan must be cared for. I knew and did nothing.”
“Nah, it’s not. Sugawara’s a cunt, and we’ll kill him. Ezza?”
I thought for a moment. “I mean, part of what we agreed was that I wouldn’t be obligated to participate in murder, justified or otherwise. But in principle, yeah, I think everyone’s better off if he’s—”
“Flame.” She looked like she wanted to hit me, which was warranted. She was in the process of taking off her eyepatch entirely, shaking out her hair as she did. She fixed me with a glare of crimson crystal, and I flinched involuntarily under the baleful magi-organ.
“Uh—yeah, on it.”
I tried to call forth my Flame. Heatcold trickled out of my chest and down my arm—but the feeling just pooled in the scars on my forearm, no ignition into the blinding white fire. I didn’t have any pain of my own to feed it, too swaddled in the comfortable coziness of whatever painkiller regimen I was on. I also didn’t have the frustration I’d felt with Hina, or the desperation of when I’d saved Yuuka.
But I did have anger on Takagiri’s behalf, far more than I expected.
My hand burst into a swirl of fire, painting the room in white glare splashed by ultra-black shadows everywhere the light could not reach as well as a few places it ought to have been able. I gasped at my first trickle of real pain, strong enough to reach me even through the medicated numbness. Takagiri flinched at the burst of raw magic, which made me feel unaccountably guilty. Was I unknowingly following in the footsteps of something Sugawara had done to her? Or was that just because the last time we’d done this had been when we’d beaten the shit out of her?
But she met my eyes, and I saw that my anger at what had been done to her was a shallow reflection of the ocean of her own rage. She’d been abused beyond belief by Sugawara’s violation of her Flame, his intrusion into her mind and soul—the invasion of sleep was a realm of horror I’d hoped to never directly encounter.
We would set it right. It was in that shared fury that I found the energy to feed my Flame and keep my arm aloft for Yuuka. My arm shook slightly from even that simple exertion, a sign of how badly I’d overworked my muscles, growing worse with each second. But all I had to do was keep my arm where Yuuka could see it as she alternated between staring into the blinding cascade and looking at Takagiri.
After ten or twenty very long seconds of turning her head to and fro, a frown crossed Yuuka’s face, then a wince. She hurriedly waved for me to put my arm down. I extinguished my flame, and the unnatural light evaporated off the walls, the spots of abyssal shadow re-normalizing as the overhead LEDs reasserted their neutral, medical glow. I opted to bring in my other hand to gently lower my trembling, exhausted arm and give it a little nerve-stimulating shake, rather than let it flop haphazardly.
“Well?”
“Transmission would still take place. And it’s…” she shifted her weight, rubbing her head. “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to fucking kill him.”
“Uh. Is that a prophecy?” I sort of hoped it was.
“I’ll make it one.” The anger was in her, as well, which I found oddly relieving. She put the eyepatch back on. “But as for what I saw…yeah, no, we gotta stop this. I think we can, is the good news.” She put a hand on Takagiri’s shoulder. “We’re gonna go talk to Ai. I’ve got an idea.”
Before Yuuka could lead her out of the room, Takagiri bowed to me. “Thank you.”
“It’s…fine? It’s the right thing to do. It’s what the Vaetna would do,” I decided. “Monsters die. And I was just, uh, the torch.” I gestured at Yuuka. “She did the hard stuff.”
Takagiri came up out of the bow. “Torch? There is a better word, I think.”
“…Lantern?”
“Lighthouse.”
—
I have no idea if Takagiri intended to set my thoughts so awhirl with that, but it stuck in my brain as they left, sending me teetering along a precarious tightrope of thoughts pertaining to the circumstances of my arrival at Todai, the fact that I was seemingly starting to fit in, and, of course, the “gender shit,” as I’d put it. I’d actually been intending to ask Takagiri about that, hadn’t I? Before I’d gotten sidetracked by her much more pressing issue, of course.
Latching onto that thought, thinking of my handful of interactions with “Kimura,” I realized I probably already knew where she stood—she had already been under the impression I was some flavor of not-cis at the BBQ. The way she’d repeatedly complimented my hair, her hesitant probing as to my pronouns, and most tellingly, what she’d spat at me right before Alice had revealed they were of a kind:
They won’t understand you. They will use it against you. It will end like this for you as well.
Grim. But she’d said all that under the misapprehension that none of the Radiances were trans themselves, that they would be so coldhearted as to hold my gender over me as Sugawara had done to her, and she seemed to have changed her mind in the sleepless days between then and now. Actually—had that been why she’d first sought me out, back when she’d simply been “my stalker?” To scope me out to see whether I was slipping into the same situation she’d been in for years?
I’d get a chance to talk to her more about it later, once we were both in better places…hopefully. I was glad that my combo trick with Yuuka seemed to have made a difference; moving the needle was both satisfying to my problem-solving brain and a salve for my justice-seeking brain.
Unfortunately, without that cognitive chew toy as a means of self-distraction, I was left staring at the text Hina had sent.
It felt plaintive and desperate, and I was no longer able to pretend I felt she deserved to be so miserable—censured, perhaps, and some guilt behooved her, but I could no longer deny the presence of that urge to go to her, to comfort her. Stupid, irrational animal-brain. We needed to have a serious talk about the pretenses under which she’d brought me to Todai, her own morality, the ethics of our relationship; instead, I was growing increasingly worried that, once we were face to face, I’d just…not do any of that and simply snuggle up against her and pretend everything was alright between us so that I could keep enjoying the animal comforts of her company. I liked having a girlfriend, and I liked even more that she was so…well, more. I didn’t want to give her up, so I was possessed of the desire to avoid the talk we needed to have.
I sent a message before I could give in to those feelings.
Ezzen: Hey, yeah, we should talk.
Where? Doing it over text would minimize the temptations and desires that came with being face-to-face with her, but…no. She needed my physical presence. Did I want her to come here to the 18th floor and sit on that chair Alice and then Yuuka had used, continue the parade of magical girls? That didn’t feel right, though it was certainly logistically simplest if I was still bedridden. My body still felt too weak to get up, and I didn’t want to try before consulting a medical professional. That would just be a mundane version of overloading my muscles with magic.
“Ebi?” I called out.
“Yeah,” came a voice from—I wasn’t really sure where. I looked around, then realized it was an intercom mounted into the wall next to my bed. I felt kind of stupid talking to it—I remembered the video feed of Amane she’d shown and looked up at the ceiling. Sure enough, there was a little black dome in the corner. I made eye contact with that; easier than with a human.
“What’s my, uh, status? Can I get up and walk around?”
“Not gonna ask how Amane is?”
“Uh. How’s Amane?”
“She’s alright, no thanks to you guys.”
“Oh. Yeah, that tracks. Sorry.” I resisted the urge to derail into arguing about the necessity of it. “So. Can I get up?”
“To go exchange fluids with your female?”
I bristled. “Dude, what’s with you?”
“Messing with you,” replied the voice from the terminal. “I think you can probably make the trip. On two conditions.”
I sighed. “No green to juice up my limbs, got it. And we will not be doing anything…untoward, relax, not a drop of red in sight. I’m sorry about Amane, really. Give her my apologies when she’s up.”
“Uh huh. Well, I’m tied up with her right now—literally, arm in her stomach—so you’re on your own. You know how to take out an IV?”
“Yeah.” Old memories. “I can manage, I think. Can I get, uh, crutches?”
“Cabinet to your left. Haven’t adjusted them since last time you used them.”
There was a click as the intercom disconnected. I went back to my phone.
Ezzen: Okay, coming to you, I think. Give me a few minutes.
Removing the intravenous needle was simple, just pressing some gauze over it and pulling it out carefully so as not to damage the vein too much. I’d done it a hundred times before, and the technology hadn’t advanced much in the past few years. As I reached for the roll of medical tape conveniently attached to the IV unit, I was pleased to find my arms were approaching something I could call regular function; though they still had that day-after-workout weakness, and would surely have the associated soreness once the medication left my system, they weren’t shaking. Slow movements were manageable.
After binding down the gauze with the tape, I gave the rest of my body an experimental stretch, quietly hoping that some of the superhuman speed and lightness had stuck around after my self-enhancement. No luck—I just felt weak all over, my core and my legs sharing my arms’ recalcitrance to exert themselves any further. But as I sat up a little more and extracted myself from the blanket, something did feel different: despite having slept for two full days, I didn’t feel stiff in the slightest. My muscles were mush, but the tendons were loose and relaxed. I tentatively put my legs in the butterfly position and tried to stretch my back. My forehead could now touch the mattress without effort.
That was new—and exciting. I tried a few more stretches of that sort and found the same, easily pushing all my joints to their maximum from a cold start. That seemed to be the whole of the changes, though—my foot had not magically grown back, my hand’s burn scars were the same as they’d always been, and I’d already established that my hair was still the new, mysteriously vibrant orange. Still, this one minor change was enough to set me abuzz with nerves as I swung my legs over the edge of the bed; proof undeniable that I’d been permanently altered by the ripple I’d commanded.
With a shimmy and a lean, I reached for the cabinet Ebi had indicated and pulled the door open. I found the crutches—plus, between them, my prosthetic foot sitting atop a new stabilizer module disc.
I grabbed the prosthetic first and gave it a look. It was the same one I’d been using, judging by the minor scuff marks on the underside of the toes. I’d broken the {AFFIX} lattice when I’d rewoven it to launch myself at Takagiri by anchoring it to the floor of Hina’s room instead of to my foot; it’d been useless after that, hanging loose in my sock for the remainder of the incident. It seemed Ai had repaired it, though, as the prosthetic attached to my amputation without issue.
The stabilizer module was entirely new, by the looks of it. The old one had been ruined beyond repair from Hina’s meteoric pounce upon the barbecue—and she’d made the old one, which meant this one was also her handiwork, put together while I was unconscious. Alice had said Hina hadn’t left her room at all, but her guilt evidently wasn’t just making her mope; she was already trying to atone, at least when it came to me specifically. The first stabilizer module had been much the same, an apology for feeling like she’d hurt me. She did her best work when she felt guilty.
That would make this conversation even more difficult.
—
The penthouse was vacant. With Ai in her workshop, Alice packed with meetings, and Amane and Yuuka in the medical ward under Ebi’s supervision, there was nobody around, and the common living space was showing its disuse. The midday sun shone through the panel of windows onto empty bean bag chairs and the empty easel. The dish rack next to the sink was empty, but the island was littered with takeout containers and empty bowls of instant ramen; Hina was the primary cook for the household, and with her staying exclusively in her room since our collective return from the disastrous barbecue, I suspected nobody had had the time or energy to cook real meals.
I’d only been able to distract myself for a few minutes by aimlessly wandering around the penthouse before my feet had dragged me inexorably to the threshold of Hina’s room to face the silly clip-art sapphire that dangled from the door by a lone piece of tape. I was a little nervous to once again enter this den of coziness and clove incense and candlelight; I feared it would suck me right in, such that I would be unwilling to have the conversation we both needed. But we’d managed to do it last time, after our crimes at the oil rig. I put my hand to the wooden door and knocked.
Nothing. I frowned.
“Hina?”
Still nothing. My frown deepened as I reached for my phone.
Ezzen: Hey, I’m outside. Can I come in?
Hina: always
I tested the doorknob and found the room unlocked. Swinging the door open revealed darkness; her flight simulator at the far end of the foyer sat inert, and no glow of candles shone from the archway into her bedroom. I gingerly stepped in, hobbling to where the rooms met and looking into her den. It was dark, blackout curtains drawn to repel the sun, and I debated whether I should leave the door open behind me just so I wouldn’t be drowned in darkness. But this conversation deserved due privacy, even with the penthouse as empty as it was; it was the principle of the thing. I closed the door behind me and called out.
“Uh. Hina?”
Still nothing. I scanned the darkness, looking suspiciously at the various lumpy blankets. Was she burrowed under one of those, nesting as deep as she could to shut out the world?
“Is this all just a prank? Are you about to pounce on me? Because I’m really not up for it.”
No movement and no reply. I went to my phone again.
Ezzen: ???? I’m in your room. Where are you?
I stared at the screen, the only source of light in here, waiting for a reply. It took a solid fifteen seconds.
Hina: the other room
Oh. That made sense. For something like her, that was the ultimate refuge, entirely inaccessible to anyone but her fellow flamebearers. But I wasn’t going back out there; even if she’d sealed the room back up after its catastrophic breach—not a guarantee, knowing her—the idea of going back out there filled me with dread. Besides, I physically couldn’t. Did she expect me to just dive up and out of reality and swim right to her? I couldn’t recreate whatever I’d done to reunite with my spear; it was right here in my tattoo binding.
Ezzen: I can’t go back out there. If you and I are going to talk, it’s going to be right here, in your room in the building. Please?
“Okay,” she whispered.
I jumped at the lump on the floor that hadn’t been there a moment ago. I’d been expecting her to put up more of a fight, and the fact that she hadn’t was, frankly, worrying. And my intuition was right; she had bundled herself up, mummified in blankets and darkness.
“Hina? You…alright?”
“No.”
Well, it had been a stupid question. I carefully lowered myself down to the floor, setting the crutches beside me, and folded my legs. We sat in silence for what must have been two full minutes as I waited for her to say more. In that time, my eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, and I saw that the room was a bit of a mess, wrappers and other trash scattered all across the floor. Next to Hina’s lump sat a fist-sized box. It was hard to tell the color in the darkness. Red? Maybe green?
When Hina did speak up, her voice sounded like crushed gravel.
“I hate this.”
My heart hurt, but I tried to keep stable, hear her out. “Which part?”
“I hate fucking up like this. I hate making Alice and Ai and Amane and Yuuka and Ebi and you all mad at me. You’re way too nice and forgiving to the…the fucking hazard I am. I hurt a lot of humans—a lot of people, and I didn’t care. All I could think about was that he—she—was going to hurt you, and I went so far beyond overkill. It happens every fucking time, because I’m just…broken. And I can’t stop myself, I don’t want to stop myself until it’s too late. And now you’re gonna break up with me and I deserve that.”
That was a pretty accurate assessment of the situation, and she’d reached the same conclusion I had: this was heading for a breakup. But as I’d feared, the depths of her remorse cut me and made it difficult to just come out and agree with her. I didn’t want to hurt her more than she was already hurting herself.
“I…I’d like to think we can make this work,” I muttered. “Keep going with this. With us. And there’s a…” I wanted to broach the gender stuff, the pretense, but I couldn’t, not yet. It wouldn’t matter anyway unless she was able to control herself better, to respect the wishes of her teammates and me before she caused disasters and hurt people. So that’s where this had to start. “You want to be better, yeah?”
“So fucking much. But I can’t. I can’t,” the lump cried. “It’s not—there’s no control over it at all.” She was quiet for a few moments. “Yuuka’s right. She’s always right. I’m a fucking monster who can’t do anything but hurt people and you’re insane to want anything to do with me. They’re fucking stuck with me now, but you can leave. You should.”
Perhaps I should. But I didn’t want to.
“I can’t—how many people did you kill?”
The Hina-lump was quiet for a few seconds.
“None.”
“Really?”
“That’s what Ai said, but she’s just trying to make me feel better. Waste of her fucking time.”
“I don’t think she would lie to you about that,” I reasoned, trying to keep my voice soft. “I mean…we did act fast, and Miyoko supposedly performed at least one miracle, to save the food. I’d be surprised if she did that before doing everything in her power to save her, uh, flock. I…can believe she and Hongo managed to keep anybody from dying. Begrudgingly. Ai definitely wouldn’t lie about that,” I repeated. It was so weird for me to be defending Hikanome’s decency and capabilities like this; this storm brought strange bedfellows indeed.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Sure. I believe you,” she lied, voice dead.
“Hina,” I sighed. I had to switch tracks. “Just…so you want to be better, yeah?”
“Right now, sure. But it never lasts. I’ll just…run away again, find something to hunt until I feel better, and then it’s back to crazy kemono bitch. It’s just what I am. Not—not transcendent, not more, not a fairy. Just a really fucked up girl who’s better off staying right here where she can’t start hurting people again.”
I thought back to the ebb and flow of our encounters, how she’d fled from me on that first night, and more recently, how she had freaked out and run away to hunt Takagiri, the thing that had kicked off this whole debacle.
“That’s what happened after I, uh, hit you?”
“Mhm,” said the lump.
“Okay, uh…therapy?” That was the first thing that came to mind.
“Therapy is for humans.”
“Hina,” I groaned.
“I…” Her voice collapsed into a throaty whine that made my throat tighten. “Sorry. Sorry. I mean that literally, though. I’m just—yeah, I got a diagnosis from a psych. Borderline, bipolar. But I feel stuff so much stronger than a human does, so I can’t just…I can’t think my way out of it like you’re supposed to. Drugs don’t do shit either.”
“You’re not beyond help. Nobody is.”
—is what I was supposed to say, but I could recognize that would get nowhere with her. Instead, I was quiet, trying to think through what I knew of her, all the weird inhumanity and screwed-up priorities. I wanted her to be better. I needed her to be better; so did her teammates. What could make her be better? What did she care about?
So what I actually said was:
“Leverage.”
The lump shifted wordlessly, and I sighed a little, crawling toward her over the rolling pillow-and-blanket landscape. My limbs were weak, but this was the most forgiving terrain imaginable, and I eventually laid down next to the lump, on my back, looking up at the ceiling.
“Leverage,” I repeated. “Lesson one. You were trying to teach me that because you thought it was important for me as a flamebearer. It’s your…philosophy, I guess, or something like it. And that means it works for you, right? Even when you were manic—and you sure as hell were that night—you recognized it, valued it. So…I think you can be better, if we have the right leverage over you. And we do, I think. Because you love us—all of us. Right?”
The lump moved slightly closer to me, blanket rustling in the quiet, until her back—at least I was pretty sure it was her back—pressed against my arm. I found myself smiling and took that as a sign to continue.
“Thought so. It’s sort of…all you care about, isn’t it? And that’s not good, but it gives us a lot of leverage over you. I’m sure that…Alice, probably, has tried this before, and it sounds like it hasn’t worked. But as for me…I’ve got some idea of what you want from me, and I think—I hope—that you want it badly enough to stop you from acting on your worst impulses. And I know that’s not really a viable long term solution. Hell, it’s not even a healthy one, but we have to start somewhere, and I do mean we. You brought me here, after all. And I think you’ve felt guilty about it the whole time.”
She whined again, loudly. She knew where this was going. I rolled over a little so that my chest was against her back and hugged her with one arm.
“Hina, why did you bring me here? To Todai, instead of the Spire? What’s the real reason?”
“We could help you here. That’s what Jason said. I shouldn’t have fucking listened. I knew I’d get hooked and push you too far, and—and…”
I rubbed her shoulder through the blanket. “Help me with being an egg, you mean.”
“Oh,” she choked out, “they talked to you.”
“Yeah. And—you didn’t,” I said sadly. “I…I wish you had. I think.”
The lump jerked away from me. “No. No you don’t. I woulda fucked it all up. I am fucking it all up. So fucking stupid to think I could have actually had anything with you without talking about it, but I was so scared you’d run off, and…I’m so fucking selfish,” she whimpered. “I mean, fuck, that first night? How—why the fuck did I think that was okay?”
“Hey.” I squeezed her shoulder, trying to stop the spiral. “I’m…you didn’t force anything on me. Not then and not since. You were the one who stopped, because you knew you’d go too far—hold on, didn’t we have this exact talk like a week ago?”
“Mm.”
“Huh. Yeah, we totally did. But it’s different now, isn’t it? Because—fuck,” I groaned, remembering something. “On the date, when we were at…the clothing place. Uniqlo?” That sounded right. “I was so nervous you’d fuckin’. Force me into a skirt. And not because of anything you said or did! That was all me. And there’s been…Christ, probably so many other little things I just forgot about because I thought they were normal to think.” I facepalmed with my free hand. “Hina, if you’re really scared of being overbearing with me, or of ruining me, you shouldn’t be.”
“Okay.”
I squeezed her closer. “You listening?”
“Yeah,” she muttered, more genuine. “Just…do I even like you because of who you are? Or do I just see…Alice in you? Or Jason? Do I just fucking chase trans people because they want to be something else like I do?”
I hesitated. That was a scary prospect, and one I’d been avoiding thinking about since Alice had gotten through to me. Of course I wanted Hina to want me—to love me—for me, not for a label she’d assigned me all by herself. That was the core of the problem, really, the thing that had been silently hanging over our relationship without my knowing: she’d been assuming what I wanted, that me being some flavor of not-cisgender was a foregone conclusion and conflating it with my desire to be more than human. That she had been right was immaterial; the communication was the problem.
Also, had she just confirmed to me that Jason was trans? I mentally pocketed that one for later, forcing my indolent arms and abs to help me sit up.
“I think…that’s for you to decide. But either way, it sounds like I have just…so much leverage over you. An amount that frightens me, honestly. So here’s…here’s what I’m thinking. I’ve already given you a second chance, back after what we did at Thunder Horse.” The stumbling corpse, that handful of pixels of guilt, flashed through my mind. “But that was…all under a pretense of how I thought our relationship worked, what you wanted from me. I had been under the impression you just wanted to make me ‘like you’ in the sense of being, well, violent and powerful and manic, and you were happy to play into that. But that’s not what you were really after. So—do you want to make me a girl? Is that your endgame? I…entertained some ideas that you did, but dismissed them for reasons that I’m now kicking myself for.”
Hina whimpered again, then shifted around and rolled over to face me, though she was still a lump under the knot of blankets. I heard her take a deep breath.
“I just want you to be happy. Not…miserable, stuck. Same thing I wanted for Alice I don’t—fuck,” she sobbed. “But I don’t care whether that’s a boy shape or a girl shape or something else. I swear. And I…cutie, this is so fucking stupid. I’m fucking stupid.”
“I think we’re both really dumb,” I sighed, relief pushing away nerves and tension. I don’t know what I’d have done had she said that, yes, her endgame was simply to make me a girl. But this I could work with—I wanted to make it work. “Okay, okay,” I breathed, “let’s establish a new baseline. Last time, we said boundaries. And that—honestly, I think that worked?” I took lump-Hina’s lack of response as depressed affirmation and continued. I felt like I was about to drive a knife into her chest, but it had to be said. “But this time, about what you did at Hikanome’s barbecue…I want to give you a third chance, make us work. I really do. But.”
This time, I waited until she responded.
“What,” she rasped, tears in her voice.
“But we’re done if you fuck up like that again, make a mistake so big that your failure to control yourself is measured in human lives, lives I know you care about deep down. You—we—got so fucking lucky this time that nobody actually died, but there’s no way that’ll happen again. That’s my leverage. You can fuck up in smaller ways, even overstep with me personally, now that we’re on the same page with what you want from me. But you’ll lose me forever if you can’t rein in your mania when it counts most.”
It was harsh, and it hurt to say, but I got it out there without so much as a stumble. The words poured from somewhere inside me, really, rather than being consciously thought out; it was just the only way she and I could still work.
A sound split the following silence, an ugly, sniffling sob. Then another. Hina began to bawl under her protective layer of blankets. I desperately wanted to lie back down and hug her close, or better yet, squirm my way under the bedding myself and wipe away the tears, but I held my ground, blinking away my own tears. She needed me to say it. The sobs turned to a hoarse whine that split me open, and I just had to sit through it and wait for her to either cry it all out or run away again.
After a very long minute, one of the longest of my life, the heart-rending sounds settled into quiet sniffles, and she gave her reply.
“Fuck, I’m so dumb,” she sobbed, “I don’t deserve you. I don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve me, you deserve so much better. What—” she sniffled, seeming to compose herself. Her voice was a little clearer when she continued. “Cutie, yes, of course. Be something for me to lose, please, please, please. That’s all I need. I won’t fuck up again, I won’t disappoint you. Please don’t leave me.”
At last, that was enough to get me to start crying as well. I laid back down with her, cradling the lump of her form with my body so that we were facing each other. It would have been vaguely lewd if we were face to face, some kind of sixty-nine arrangement, but the veil of separation between us kept the emotional intimacy with none of the absurd horniness that could spoil the moment. I wept more quietly than she did, and I certainly didn’t whine, but they were tears all the same. We could work—she was at least willing to try, for my sake. That meant so much.
She eventually spoke again.
“Cutie?”
“Yeah?”
“I should have asked. What do you want to be?”
“A Vaetna.” The response was automatic, but it wasn’t the whole thing, and she waited for me to find the words to continue. “I mean…gender-wise, I have no idea. I’m like an hour or two into thinking about this. I talked to Yuuka and Ebi about what they thought of me, and…does ‘exotic cave lesbian’ sound like me?”
She didn’t giggle at that, but I did hear a smile in her voice, the first since…since I’d crushed her ribcage, a solid week ago, somehow. Was our relationship that fraught?
“Mm. Sorta? But I thought…you didn’t want me to define this for you.”
“I still value your advice. I mean, this would be, what, your third time?” I was putting the pieces together. “I mean, Alice explained her whole history with this, and it’s sounding like Jason is also trans. Trans man, specifically, yeah?”
“Mhm…”
“Which means you do not have a history of turning people to girls specifically. That’s a relief.”
“So…no girl?”
“I don’t know yet. Something in the middle, maybe,” I mused, “or something else altogether? I’m just throwing darts at the wall here.”
“I’ll help you with whatever it is. You deserve to be happy.” Her voice fell. “You don’t deserve me,” she repeated.
“Remains to be seen,” I countered. “Do you honestly think you can never be better, long-term, without the, uh, Sword of Damocles we just set up? Will it just be leverage forever? What if—hold on,” I said, an idea germinating. “You blamed your Flame for making you like this.”
“Yeah. It makes me worse, pushes me too far,” she sighed, despondent. “Makes the mania like…a brain fog, or something, where I only have to care about one thing. I hate it, but not while it’s happening. It feels awesome while it’s happening.”
“So you want to be…normal? Or at least less extreme?”
“I guess. You’re going somewhere with this?”
“Well, if your Flame changed you to be like this, maybe it can change you back?”
I heard her breath catch. “No. No, no nono. Cutie, I can’t give up being what I am, I can’t go back to being just a human, it’d—”
“No, no,” I soothed. “I love your…physicality, the power, the way you just flit around like it’s nothing. I mean mentally. You’re more meshed into your Flame than…any flamebearer I know of, though I really still don’t have as good of a grasp on that as I’d like,” I griped. “Point is, being a flamebearer is to be changed. You’re practically the embodiment of that. If you want to become less…extreme, if you really want it badly enough, wouldn’t your Flame hear that?”
Hina was quiet for a moment, considering this. “Alice’s tail,” she sighed. “Sometimes the Flame just…does shit. Dramatic irony, Yuuka likes to call it. I might be the same.”
“Maybe,” I hedged. “But maybe not. Don’t you want to find out? Don’t you want to try?”
“So much,” she sobbed, voice breaking again. “Please. Why are you putting up with me? The others all just…you remembered lesson one.”
I gave this a moment’s proper thought. “…Because I like you,” I decided. “Despite everything. Because of everything? Ugh. Hold on.”
I sat up once more and crawled my way across the blankets once more, toward the blackout curtains. There was a little pulley, and I tugged with what little strength I could muster. Bit by bit, sunlight spilled into the room, playing over the peaks and valleys of bedding and scattering through the crumpled-up tissues. It felt a little cheesy, but I was tired of darkness, especially after my brief jaunt outside reality. I blinked repeatedly to help my eyes adjust as I ambled back toward the Hina lump, trying to find the seam of her little blanket pod. She didn’t resist as I raised it, and finally came face to face with those blue, blue eyes. They were bloodshot, and the entire mask around her eyes was red from crying.
“Hey. Sunlight’s good for you.” Hypocritical, honestly, given my history of indoorsmanship, but it was still correct.
Hina nodded, looking nervous, and shimmied out from under the blankets shyly, sapphire eyes glimmering in the sunshine. The moment I dropped the hem, she pounced forward, tackling me down onto the pillow I’d found myself on top of, and nuzzled my neck.
“Love you. Love you love you love you love you!”
I stroked her hair, taking in the scent—not a particularly good one, as she clearly hadn’t bathed, and whatever no-body-odor thing Alice had going on obviously didn’t extend to my feral girlfriend. That was okay. Her hand mirrored mine, flowing through my obnoxiously orange tresses, then rubbed around my chin and neck as a giggle fluttered through her.
“No beard, wow. Very cis. Soooo cis.”
“I…yeah.”
I found myself smiling—how could I not, really? She pressed something into my other hand, and I leaned away from her a little to get a look at it. It was a little red box—Valentine’s chocolate.
“You already gave me one of these.”
“That was Yuuka’s. I never gave you yours, and you soooo deserve it.”
I tried to force the stupid grin off my face for a moment of seriousness. “Hina, this will still be a process. It has to be. If this is you swinging back into mania…”
The mask of joy cracked on her face. Her shoulders hunched. “I know. I know, I know. Not yet. Just…I was ready for you to break up with me. I wanted you to. It feels kind of unfair that you didn’t, and I’m feeling good. Do…should we stop?”
“Maybe,” I thought. “I…I think you have to fix a bit more of what you broke, first, before we can go back into the swing of things. My libido hates me for saying that, by the way.”
“Okaaaay.” She was giving me the puppy eyes. “How can I help?”
“Uh. I’m sure Alice has an entire file folder about Hikanome and the government and all that. But on my end of things…you want to hunt? Together?”
From what she’d said, hunting was an isolation tactic, a punishment by way of depriving herself of the people she loved, giving herself something to fixate on until the mania kicked in again. But it didn’t have to be that; it could be something we shared, a way for me to be there with her, to indulge our mutual desire to be more, to destroy evil together.
As I’d hoped, she lit up. “Keep going,” she whispered gleefully.
“Sugawara’s alive, and he’s even more of a monster than we thought. He’s got Takagiri in a…I don’t know what to call it. Psychic stranglehold, horrible shit. Let’s stop the problem at the source.”
Author’s Note:
And that concludes the regular chapters of Arc 2: Trick Of The Light. There’s still the interlude to go, which will put a bit more of a bow on the events of this arc, but is mostly going to be lore. Yay! Also, there’ll be the big authors note post.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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“She hasn’t come out of her room since we got back.”
My stomach twisted. Last time that had happened, Hina had been stewing in remorse. This time, it served her right, but even so…
“Oh. That’s…bad, yeah.”
Alice sighed. “Very, very bad. Normally she just runs away when she gets like this, so the fact that she’s not…I’ve said what I can to try to cheer her up, but she’s a mess. She thinks you’re mad at her.”
“…I am.” I couldn’t entirely suppress the guilt that lurched through me. She was in deep shit and deserved to be—but I couldn’t help but feel bad. “And it falls to me to fix her?”
Alice winced, as did I a moment later; I could have phrased that better. Her tail thumped unhappily. “No. She’s…intractable when she’s like this, and that’s not your problem to solve. Or anybody’s, really. You feel the need to talk to her about your relationship?”
I avoided Alice’s gaze, looking out the narrow window on the far side of the wall to my right. “I…yeah. Both about yesterday and about…about pretense, I guess.”
“Yeah. Well—going to her won’t work, I’m sorry to say. I suggest you wait for her to come to you, because she will, eventually. She’s been waiting for you to be up, so probably in a few hours, but don’t try to force it, yeah?”
I nodded at that, trying to decide how relieved I was to be able to put off the conversation. As much as I needed to talk to her, I feared it was doomed to be an ugly, rocky thing, and I didn’t have the emotional bandwidth for another heavy conversation quite yet. In light of that, I was alright with letting Hina decide when she was ready. In the meantime, I wanted to see how Amane and Yuuka were doing. Though I wasn’t exactly in a position to get up—I still felt very weak, and the painkillers made it hard to gauge how messed up my body was.
I gestured at the bed. “Could you ask Ebi how much more of…this, there’ll be?”
Alice stood from her chair, stretching her back with a pop and twisting to tug the base of her tail this way and that. “Being bedridden sucks, doesn’t it?”
I gaped. “Are you rubbing it in?”
“No, I’m trying to express sympathy—” She paused her stretching and seemed to realize what she was doing. The room got a degree hotter as she flushed. “Oh. No, sorry, just stretching because my tail really hurts if I stay sitting too long and you reminded me of that—augh,” she groaned, face red. “Insensitive of me, my apologies.”
“It’s fine,” I assured her, sharing somewhat in the embarrassment. That one had been my bad. “That’s a…normal ache, I hope? Not new?”
“Think so.” She looked uncomfortable with that topic and shook herself, then spoke to the empty air. “Ebi? Prognosis on Ezzen’s condition, please?”
The android obligingly appeared from nowhere. She was holding a platter like a waitress, and a meaty aroma wafted into the air. I blinked.
“Um?”
“You’ll be cleared to get up and walk around a bit, but not until you’ve eaten,” the android explained. “Hungry?”
My stomach was already gurgling at the smell of hot protein. I was urgently aware that I was starving, and I very much agreed with Ebi—nothing else could happen until that was resolved. This was a problem Alice understood well, and a grin actually flitted across her face when she heard my body’s complaint. The bed-mounted tray table swung over to my lap with a motorized whirr. Ebi set the platter down in front of me. The hunger was muted slightly as I saw what it held; I eyed the spread, deeply distrustful.
“Surely this is contaminated. Or just old.”
“Wrong on both counts. It has my seal of approval,” Ebi declared.
Piled before me were leftovers from Hikanome’s barbecue. There were roasted chicken-and-vegetable skewers, tandoor-baked buns stuffed full of kebab meat, and a plate of roasted corn ribs with some kind of mayo dip. It all looked and smelled suspiciously fresh for food that should have been three days old and rescued from the epicenter of an inferno.
“Miyoko did…something to save most of the food after she woke up, and Hikanome is distributing it to attendees who were injured,” Alice explained. “That includes you. She sends her apologies for the clusterfuck.”
“Not even slightly her fault, is it? All Hina’s,” I muttered, delicately holding up a skewer and staring at it. How had Miyoko done this? Some kind of state-lock in orange to keep it from having gone bad as it sat out in the weather, maybe, but cleansing it of any ripple contamination was an order of magnitude more complex. A miracle, in short, and a classic one—food for the sick. How noble.
I still couldn’t help but be suspicious. Even if the food did pass muster from Ebi in terms of food safety, if it was primarily intended for the cult’s own injured, then who was to say that preservation was the only thing Miyoko had done? I squinted.
“This isn’t ‘blessed’, is it? Something in green to aid regeneration? Is that a thing she can do?”
Ebi rolled her digital eyes. “There’s nothing off about it. We wouldn’t feed you something with unknown magical effects when your body’s still recovering from whatever the hell you did to it. It’s good food, or so I hear,” the machine grinned. “Eat up.”
She plopped a familiar milkshake onto the tray as well, the same nutritionally fortified type I’d been given for my first meal at Todai. I trusted that more than the cult leader’s supposedly-not-imbued-with-anything offering and took a few sips while I waited for my hunger to inevitably overcome my reservations. I tugged a piece of chicken off the end of its skewer with my teeth, chewed, and found it as fresh and tender as if it had just come off the grill.
I ate the rest of the skewer before even thinking, and then the feast began. Bite, chew, swallow, grab, dip, bite, chew—both of my hands were fully occupied with the task of replenishing my body’s nutritional stock. Grease dripped down my chin, and rather than reach for a napkin, I just wiped it off with a piece of pita and promptly ate that as well. I was aware my table manners were horrific, positively animalistic, but the food had to get in me. Was this how Hina had felt when she’d eaten that piece of fried chicken? Voracious and uninhibited?
As I ate, I rationalized that this was to be expected of anybody who’d gone through what I had and then slept for two full days; my body was naturally ravenous for energy and material to…do whatever all that green ripple had set me up for. And hunger truly was the best spice—everything was positively delicious, even though I only had moments to appreciate the flavor of any given bite and the culinary skill involved before my body demanded I swallow it to send it on its way to the stomach.
It was only when Alice cleared her throat that I somewhat came back to myself. I looked up at her and Ebi, my face invaded by a wave of flushed embarrassment as I remembered the women hovering over me. Alice had edged toward the door, apparently intent on taking her leave.
“Got to get back to it,” she explained. “Really, I get it. Glad to see you’re doing alright. Don’t, uh, choke?”
An eminently reasonable concern—a little undercut by the entire leg of chicken that had somehow appeared in her hand as she shouldered the door open. Hunger was contagious for us green-ripple-affected folk, apparently. With my mouth too full of food to reply verbally, I opted for a thumbs up, trying to transmit a wish for her good luck on whatever ordeals awaited. Her tail disappeared around the threshold a moment after she did.
Ebi was still right there, but she wasn’t looking at me directly. I got the sense she was somewhat disgusted by my organic, masticatory processes of fuel intake. That wasn’t enough to stop me from continuing to devour my meal, though. After a long half minute of trying not to watch my jaw unhinge, she emitted a ping sound and made a show of checking her wrist like she was wearing a watch.
“I gotta go too. Amethyst’s conspiring against me.”
I failed to swallow my mouthful of corn correctly, hacked an ugly cough, took a swig of iced tea, then rasped, “…What?”
But Ebi was already out the door, leaving me alone with my food. At least that meant there was nobody to watch me—aside from Hina’s specter encouraging me to eat with voracious abandon. That was far more shameful than being actually watched, so with more than two-thirds of the food now vanished into me, I eased back a little on the scarfing. I decided the best move was to distract myself and occupy one hand by checking my phone. I used the sole napkin I’d been provided to wipe off my hands and navigate to the chatroom.
I had a lot of worried DMs. I was also days behind on a lot of very intense discussion about the “BBQ Inferno”—temporary name, I hoped, too glib by half—but the running theme of the messages directed at me was much more mundane.
Photos of the fight between the Radiances and Takagiri had flooded social media, which was fine—but I was also in many of those photos, and had been correctly identified. This was…a little uncomfortable, and was probably going to happen eventually, but what everybody seemed to be talking about was my hair, the long curtain of freakish neon-orange that was easy to spot in all but the most chaotic footage of when I’d been with Yuuka and, later, Amane.
Disbelieving, I tugged a few strands into my field of view to make sure the hair was still there and hadn’t faded with time or been bleached by my brief excursion outside reality. What an absurd color; had I really gone through a life-or-death combat situation looking like that? But at least it was long, and that was far better than if all this footage had instead captured me in my horribly shorn state after the disastrous haircut—shit, that was a gender thing, wasn’t it? Was the satisfaction I felt from the curtain of hair actually gender euphoria?
That warranted more introspection, but I also had to say something. I opted for a minimal check-in to confirm that I was, in fact, alive and relatively unscathed despite being at the center of it all. Doing remarkably well, in fact, no need to worry about me, no matter how bad things had looked during the inferno. I couldn’t provide too many details; I myself didn’t really know what exactly had happened, and didn’t want to accidentally spread misinformation, you see. And yes, the hair was new.
My closer friends deserved a slightly more honest update, and I waffled a bit about what to include. I’d never actually told them of the blood magic I’d worked to epilate away all my body hair. Hell, I hadn’t even told them about the intermediary step that was the wig, not even Sky, who’d helped me navigate the haircut crisis. I should have mentioned it on the way to the barbecue; I felt guilty to have let my friends slip through the cracks like that. Both he and Star deserved a more complete rundown of the magical details…
As well as my own tentative intentions to foray into the world of gender, I supposed. But that part had practical complications: how much could I really share about the recent gender developments? Of course, telling people that Alice or Takagiri were trans was right out, for reasons of both opsec and general decency. I couldn’t even reveal to Star that Alice had seemingly found the proverbial philosopher’s stone, a magical way to transition. That would utterly rock her world—but I could also easily envision it sending her into a horrible spiral of despair when she learned it was restricted to only flamebearers, and I didn’t want to do that to her.
But the cat was still out of the bag regarding my makeover, and Star was certainly the one I trusted most about gender stuff, so I took a deep breath, typed out a message in between bites of corn, and hit send before I could lose my nerve.
ezzen: Hey, sorry about not replying to stuff, been a little out cold like I mentioned in genchat. The hair was an attempt to fix a really bad haircut – actually a side effect of a panicky full body epilation. And I’ve been thinking about why I did that and yeah it’s kind of the Vaetna dysphoria smoothness thing we’ve talked about before with shaving my face but it could also be a not-cis thing and I’m not sure?
I found myself hyperventilating a little. The pulse monitor, until now a steady beep I’d been tuning out, had accelerated into a frenetic rhythm that matched the pounding in my chest.
Ebi’s head peeked through the door.
“Dude, you alright?”
“Uh—uh.” My panic increased as I realized I’d pulled her away from helping the injured Radiances to check on me. She strode over, and I pulled my phone toward my chest so she wouldn’t see the screen. “I’m okay, it’s nothing, I’m just overreacting and—”
“No shit,” came Yuuka’s voice from the doorway. “You’ll be fine, chill out.”
The Heliotrope Radiance was wearing a green medical gown rather than her usual arrangement of dark straps and corsets, but she made it look good. No bruises, and she was standing upright. Her hair was up in the usual twintails, and her bangs were bound back to show that her cursed eye was covered with a gauze eyepatch. Seeing her up and about distracted me from my anxiety.
“Hi.”
“Heya.”
Ebi made a staticky noise at her. “Tch. Stick with Amethyst, don’t come running after me. He’s fine.” She looked at me. “You’re fine.”
“I’m fine,” I repeated, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly through my mouth, trying to force the tension to leave my shoulders. “You’re fine?” I asked Heliotrope.
“I’m fine! Well, fine enough to be walking around.” She accompanied that with another step into the room and an annoyed glare at Ebi. “And Amane is fine too.”
That was a relief, though I’d feel better seeing her safe and sound with my own eyes. The way her mantle had melted had been very upsetting. “Can I say hi to her?”
“She’s asleep,” Ebi clarified. Her face shut off for a moment, then reactivated as…a live feed of a camera watching Amane’s sleeping body, hooked up to various IVs and monitoring equipment in a bed that looked significantly fancier than mine. “See?”
“That’s incredibly weird. But thanks.” It did legitimately make me feel better, though, and the slowing beeps of the heart monitor confirmed that.
“No prob.” Her face went back to normal.
“Don’t do that,” Yuuka sighed, turning away from the android. She was distracted by the food on my plate—or what remained of it, which at this point was mostly chicken bones, bare skewers, and smears of sauce. “Lookin’ like Alice over there. You about to grow a tail?”
“I hope not,” I joked. “Ideally just…uh…” I realized I didn’t really have a clear sense of what I wanted from any potential mutations. “More muscles? Er—not bigger muscles, just stronger ones, like Hina’s got…oh shit,” I muttered. That wasn’t very cisgender of me, was it? Or was my conversation with Alice just making me read gender into things that were on the Vaetna-aspiration side of my self-image?
Yuuka gave me a funny look. “Like Hina. Seriously? Haven’t fuckin’ gotten over her?”
“I—I’m working on it,” I deflected. “Alice said she’d talk when she’s ready.”
She snorted. “Yeah, let her stew. She knows she fucked up.”
“…Yeah, I guess she did,” I admitted. “We all came out of it in one piece, though. Er, Amane aside. I mean, she’s fine, but not in one piece because she’s…” I stopped talking before I could shove my foot all the way into my mouth, and searched around for a better topic. I pointed at the remains of my food. “You have any of this yet?”
Yuuka shook her head incredulously at my catastrophic faux pas, which was warranted, but didn’t seem offended on her teammate’s behalf. “Nah, I don’t eat meat.”
I blinked, trying to recall the handful of times we’d eaten together. I hadn’t really been looking at her plate at the barbecue, too busy trying not to fuck up opsec and arguing about the Omelas allegory, so it was entirely possible she’d had a plate full of vegetarian options and I’d just missed it. “Oh. Because, uh, your eye does something horrible when you eat once-alive animals?”
“What? Fuck no, that’d suck. It’s just unethical and bad for the waistline. Don’t know what all the fuss is about, anyway.” She put a hand on her waist for emphasis. “Doesn’t even taste that good.”
“Don’t get what all the deal with food is,” Ebi remarked from where she was fiddling with my IV.
I stared at the two women. Ebi got a pass, of course, she’d never get it. And Yuuka’s first two points were reasonable, and ones I could respect in principle, but I vehemently disagreed on the third. My childhood had given me a wide palette, so I was hardly an obligate carnivore, but it had also caused me to consider a well-cooked piece of meat to be the centerpiece of most any real meal until you reached the absurd molecular gastronomy Dad had resented so much.
“But have you tried actually good—”
“—meat that isn’t just a steak cooked to death at a cheap steakhouse, and instead something different like an iberico?” Yuuka interrupted. “Hina’s tried, believe me. Didn’t work.”
“…Okay, fine,” I conceded. Maybe it wasn’t a problem with the quality of her experiences with meat. Weirdo. “Wait—is your eye back online?”
She grinned. “Kinda. Still spotty.”
That gave me an idea. I mentally checked to see if my Flame would abide an ignition. “Could you…check something for me? I’ll light it up.”
Ebi reached over and flicked my temple.
“Ow.”
“No active Flame,” she said, indicating a readout panel under the heart monitor with a bar graph of the familiar spectrum of ripple colors. “Amane.”
“Oh, right. Sorry.”
Yuuka still looked interested, though. “Doesn’t mean you can’t ask. What’s up?”
“Uh.” I realized I didn’t know how to phrase it, but my conviction was growing. I was reflecting on the caustic, hurtful vitriol Yuuka had thrown at me in our first real conversation, and how much of it had been predicated on me being “just another fucking boy.” But since she could literally see the future, did that mean that I would wind up male? Could Alice be wrong about my gender?
Waffling in front of a precog is a bad idea. Yuuka squinted at me, briefly tugged away her eyepatch to reveal a mangled mess of dark crystal and raw, still-healing red flesh, and squinted harder.
“Dude.”
“…I’m a dude?”
She straightened, putting the eyepatch back. “That’s not my fuckin’ call to make. Even if I could see that far ahead—and I can’t, especially not right now—I wouldn’t tell you. But we’re chill already, if that’s what you’re twisted up about.”
“Responsibility of prophecy,” Ebi put in. “Especially for problems of identity.”
I twisted to look at her. “Uh. How do you know what I was going to ask?”
Ebi leaned in real close to me. Uncomfortably close, really, until her screen-face was practically all I could see. Then, like a PowerPoint slide transition, the image of her face dissolved into pixels and was replaced with a stock photo of an egg. I groaned.
“Jesus, could everybody see it but me?”
“Yep,” said both the woman and the android. I winced, uncomfortably seen.
“Okay, then…foresight notwithstanding, what do you think?” I looked between the two of them. “Who…what do I seem like to you?”
Yuuka shrugged. “I’d poison the well.”
Ebi mimicked the gesture, a perfect imitation minus the boobs. “Do I look like I know what a gender is? You’re meat, and you perform as meat, and that’s all a mystery to me. I could collate hundreds of thousands of testimonials of trans experiences and behaviors to map against all the data I have on you, but that’s not much better than just reading the future. Figure it out yourself, meatbag.”
That was a hell of a pejorative, but her tone was light and accompanied by the egg image doing another, even lamer slide transition to display a thumbs-up emoji.
“Fuck you,” I exclaimed, frustration papering over the envy I felt that she could just do that. “Are you fucking with me?”
“Yeah.” Ebi’s face returned to a human grin. “I mean, you really want my honest opinion?”
“Please.”
“You’re some species of exotic cave lesbian.”
I gaped at her, trying to decipher how that made me feel. “…Are you still fucking with me?”
“I’m running diagnostics. How’s it make you feel?”
I frowned, annoyed at the tactic, but gave it a moment’s earnest thought. I found it made me angry; I didn’t want to be slotted into either side of the gender binary. “Don’t like it.”
“There you go. Data point!” the android declared smugly, smirking.
“Huh. Thanks,” I muttered. Then I registered the expression on Yuuka’s face; she was looking at me with something between doubt and amusement. I sat up a little bit more. “Don’t say you can’t weigh in and then make faces at me. If you honestly think Ebi’s right, that I am in fact some kind of cave lesbian, then say something, gimme something to go on.” The expression was already revelatory enough for where her opinions lay, but it got worse when I cross-referenced it with something else. “Hold on, you’ve called me Ezza, haven’t you?”
She crossed her arms defiantly. “Strayanism, not a girl thing.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
That was a relief. I was surprised by the grin that forced its way onto my face, how much it pleased me to not have been slotted into the other half of the gender binary, either. I reflexively raised my hand to cover the expression, but it was far too late, and Yuuka hummed.
“Mmm…okay, that being said. Foresight aside,” she covered her eyepatch with her palm, which was probably purely symbolic. “I’m sorry I was such a shit to you earlier. Really, I am,” she insisted in response to my dubious stare. “And the fact that I am sorry about that should say a lot about how masculine I think you are, ‘cause the fact remains that I hate blokes. And I don’t have a good sense for this stuff, so, like, grain of salt on that, but I do gotta agree with Ebi-tan here: whatever you’ve got going on with Hina is really, really gay. Which would be fine with me if not for the fact that it’s her.”
I redirected my stare to Ebi, whose poker face was superb, then brought it back to Yuuka. “I…uh. So you’re apologizing, but I’m still a monsterfucker?”
She nodded.
I sat back against the bed’s inclined backrest. “You know what, I’ll take it.” I told myself I was planning to break up with Hina anyway, and if Yuuka didn’t hate me for something intrinsic about what I was, that was a win in my book.
The implications about “what I was” were very concerning, though. Had all of Todai immediately pegged me as a trans woman? I was becoming increasingly sure Hina had, which was a primary reason why I was dreading talking to her. It was clear she had particular proclivities whereas the others didn’t—so it was a lot more damning if all of them agreed with her anyway. Still, if it meant they were more comfortable around me, instead of seeing me how I’d feared at first—as a guy intruding in a space full of women—that was good.
Overall, I wasn’t sure where I landed on it, other than that the probably-not-a-guy gauge was steadily rising.
“Can I get a third opinion? Ai? Or Amane?” I rubbed my face with my hands; they were still slightly greasy from my meal. “Alice has already said her bit, and…I nominally trust the six of you more than pretty much anyone else for this,” I admitted, a little surprised to feel that way. “Like, you have a better window into it than my online friends, even the trans ones.” I grabbed a few strands of my hair for emphasis. “Like, with this. I should have thought it was weird how helpful and non-judgmental Alice was about this.”
“It looks nice,” Yuuka said, and I couldn’t help but smile. It was weird to feel good about my appearance, but kind of addictive—which was part of why I’d been dragged along so easily by Hina.
“As third opinions go, there’s another trans flamebearer in the building,” Ebi said, grinning once more. “On this very floor, even. And she wants to talk to you.”
Yuuka shifted, side-eyeing the android. “I don’t know,” she mumbled, uncharacteristically nervous. “Sounds like a great way to have Alice tear my head off if it goes badly.”
“You’re a precog, there’s no ‘if’ involved. I’ll bring her in so you can forgive her. Alice already did—you really gonna let her be more mahou shoujo than you?”
As Yuuka frowned at that, looking conflicted, I sat up a little further, bristling. “Not Takagiri.”
Ebi tutted. “Hey, you too. You both need to get over your shit with her, and this is the fastest way to do it. She wants to apologize, and she needs your help. Let her.”
Yuuka considered this, then took a deep breath. She flipped up her eyepatch and turned around, looking out at the doorway, toward the rest of the building and whichever room Takagiri was in. She was quiet as she inspected the eddies of silver only she could see.
I wasn’t convinced. “It’s one thing for me to go ‘hey, it’s okay that you attacked me, apology accepted’, and another for me to ask her for advice about my identity. I don’t even know her.”
“Better than Hina,” Ebi pointed out. “I mean, they both tried to abduct you, but at least she feels bad about it. And I don’t just mean ‘needs your help’ about her general situation. Heliotrope gets it.”
On cue, Yuuka made a sound, a sharp intake of breath that sounded like a strangled cry. She turned back to me, face serious. “We—yeah, fuck, Ebi’s right, she needs our help.”
“Wait, what? That makes it sound like she’s being attacked.”
“No, but—we should hear her out.”
—
And so it was that Yuuka, Ebi, and I spoke with the person who’d attacked us; when a precog had that kind of urgency in her voice, it was sensible to listen. She couldn’t explain what Takagiri would tell us, but insisted that it was important enough that we ought not to delay with more waffling.
Takagiri wound up coming to us; I was still too bedridden to easily make the journey down the hall except by mobile bed delivery. Ebi walked her over and announced her arrival with a knock on the door. I took a deep breath and exchanged a glance with Yuuka, who’d taken Alice’s seat and moved it so that she and I were both facing the doorway, presenting a unified front. There was nothing to fear, I told myself. We held all the cards. When I felt ready, I called out.
“Come in.”
The door swung open, and there was—not Takagiri, not in body. We’d destroyed her mantle, after all, so the physical body that actually entered the room was that of Kimura, the middle-aged man who’d given the impression of being a samurai. But despite being in the wrong body, this was clearly Takagiri; there was just a little bit of a hunch to her posture rather than straight-backed formality, and the impassive placidity I’d seen in Kimura had been replaced by an alert, almost paranoid energy, brown eyes darting around the room. And she looked haggard, more exhausted than even Alice, with bags under her eyes and a weight to how she stood. She had a patch on her forearm—a pain-blocker like the one I’d used, perhaps.
Her frantic eyes came to a rest on Yuuka, and her expression twisted into something a little painful. It was easy to see why; Takagiri wore the same kind of nominally androgynous medical gown as Yuuka, but it fit very differently on the taller male figure than the busty Radiance, not nearly as curvaceous. The envy passed quickly, and her gaze moved to me instead.
“Hello, Ezzen.” Her voice was softer than it had been before; still deeper than that of her mantle—though that had mostly been yelling—but modulated quieter and higher. More feminine.
“Hi.” I tried to sit up a bit more to look intimidating.
Takagiri stepped a bit further into the room, then bowed deeply. “I apologize for my actions three days ago. I was weak and desperate, and I take full responsibility for the harm I caused to you all and to the flock. Thank you for granting me mercy, despite my failures.”
I blinked. I’d been expecting contrition, but taking the blame to this extent felt like self-flagellation. “Uh. Hina caused the inferno. That one’s not on you.”
She held the bow. “I should have stood up to Sugawara and refused to harm you. Instead, I was a coward and believed I had no choice but to attack you. I believed I was alone. I underestimated your kindness, and I beg your forgiveness.”
My kindness? It had been Alice’s decision to spare her and take her in, not mine. I glanced uncomfortably at Yuuka, who bit her lip, and said something softly to Takagiri in Japanese. She rose out of the bow, replying uncertainly, to which Yuuka shook her head.
“Forgiven, as far as I’m concerned. Ezza?”
I frowned. “I mean—I feel like I’m still missing a bunch of the pieces of the puzzle, here. I…I want to forgive you, I think, because it sounds like you’re under a horrific amount of duress, but you still tried to kill Yuuka. What’s with that?”
Yuuka blinked at me, surprised that I was prioritizing her. “Eh, that’s water under the bridge; she had orders,” she explained hurriedly, before Takagiri could. “We fought…a lot, back when this shit was all going down. There were plenty of times one of us might not have walked away from that, I get it.” She narrowed her eyes at the ex-assassin. “But…I remember one time you just walked away. You could have stopped me from getting into that office, but you didn’t.”
Takagiri met her gaze. “I was hoping you would find what you needed. For Ishikawa-chan. I thought I could turn a blind eye and lie to Sugawara that you had avoided me.” She looked at the floor and clenched her fists. “But he sees everything.”
“Everything?” I asked, suddenly wary. She’d said he was in her dreams, hadn’t she? “Even here?” When she didn’t respond, I growled a little, which made Yuuka raise her eyebrows at me. “Stop being cryptic. What’s got you so far under his thumb, and why turn away from him now?”
Takagiri took a slow breath.
“He helped build my mantle. And in doing so, tied part of his Light to mine. I am—was—not only his assassin, but his spy. Everything Takagiri Izumi saw, he would learn when I slept. Even now, even when he is in a coma, every night he flays me open and takes it.” There was bile in her voice. “To be in my proper body is to give him his only connection to the world the next night. So I have not slept since I betrayed him, because until I do, he will not know.”
Horror rose up my spine like damp floodwater, seeping into the base of my skull. I stared at Takagiri and saw how she was swaying slightly, how dark the circles under her eyes truly were. My eyes dropped to the patch on her arm. “That’s keeping you awake?”
“Yes. And online shogi.” Her face split into shattered mimicry of a grin. “I don’t know for how much longer. You destroyed my body, and I have been praying that that may be enough for me to finally be free, for the connection between me and him to be broken enough that I can rest. But I cannot take that risk.”
“Why not? What’s he got over you? I mean, there’s the blackmail, but Alice seemed confident she’d be able to turn that around, and people keep saying he’s in a coma. What can he do to you?”
“Turn her Flame into a bomb,” Yuuka whispered. My heart dropped into my stomach as she continued. “He’s done it before, though only with parceled Flame, not an entire other flamebearer.” She shifted. “Hard for me to see if they’re not about to explode, though, so it’s just a guess. I thought you were loyal, didn’t need that kind of thing.”
Takagiri hesitated. “I was, once. He was kind, at first. I told him my secret and he accepted me, told me we would build a world that would accept me, helped me build the person I wished to be, until he had a door into my soul and I could never leave.” Rage flashed in her eyes, though not directed at us. “I thought I would be free when you finally won.”
“We should have fucking killed him,” Yuuka snarled. “Shouldn’t have fucking handed him over to the cops. Mahou shoujo destroys evil.”
I agreed. This was much more along the lines of what I expected when I’d heard that Hikanome was a Flame cult, coercion and abuse far beyond what even the most horrible of mundane cults could commit. The Vaetna destroyed a few cults like that every year and took in the survivors or at least paid to help them rebuild their lives. That they hadn’t with Hikanome was…well, they couldn’t be everywhere at once. There were only ten of them, and the world was soaked in evil.
I was absolutely ready to drop all charges against Takagiri, now, and was entering problem-solving mode, fueled by anger. A person could only go for maybe a week at most without sleep and degraded very rapidly after the first few days. She’d been essentially sentenced to insanity and then death if we didn’t do something about it.
I looked past Takagiri, at Ebi, who was standing behind her in the doorway, a threshold guardian. “Ebi? It’s already been three days. Why the hell haven’t we fixed this?”
Ebi glared back at me. “We’ve been fucking trying. Ai hasn’t slept either.”
“Then why isn’t this the first thing you told me about when I woke up? Why bring in Alice to talk about the gender shit first?”
“Gender shit?” Takagiri asked.
“Because we were pretty sure that once you heard, you’d try to blood-magic your liver into glass if you thought it’d help,” Ebi retorted. “And we wanted you to at least get a meal in you before that, and Alice was nervous as hell about you having this talk while driven by inscrutable egg mania.”
Then my phone buzzed.
“And so we could get ahead of that,” Ebi added.
Her tone told me who it was. I lifted my phone from where it had been lying face-down in my lap, turning it on with all the finality of an inmate approaching the electric chair. It was a single text, and it broke my heart in half.
Hina: im sorry i love you i need you can we talk
Author’s Note:
Gemder 3: The Gemderinginging! A day late for patrons on this one, apologies.
This time including some food because we were robbed of it by the Hina Pounce. Also, Takagiri’s situation is wildly fucked up.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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If I dreamt after passing out in the grass, I don’t remember it. Perhaps I would have spoken with Holton again, or drawn the parallels between how I’d broken out of our shared dream and how I’d escaped back into reality from the abyss, or connected the gargantuan hunk of driftwood to the towering forest beyond the beach.
But instead, I just slept. I slept through finally being extracted from the inferno and taken back to Lighthouse Tower, through the remainder of the evacuation, through whatever the leaders of Todai and Hikanome had to say to one another in the immediate wake of the disaster. I slept through the inferno’s collapse and cleanup and through the initial news cycle for the biggest magical event since last week’s incident at Thunder Horse. I slept as Todai set me up in Ebi’s medical ward on the eighteenth floor, cleaned the awful dust-bunny-gunk off me, and scanned my flesh and bones for the changes my Flame had effected.
All told, I rested unconscious for three days—and that meant actually three days of healing this time, no bio-accelerant fields for me like I’d been provided when Hina had first brought me here. Ebi and Ai had been wary of kickstarting more substantial mutations in my body, and given that I had actually been mostly unharmed outside of the self-inflicted overexertion, they just hooked me up to an IV drip and let me sleep until my body decided I’d recovered enough to wake.
Thus I awoke to a familiar sight, the same as my first moments of consciousness in Japan hardly two weeks prior: a hospital room. Not quite the same one as last time, but perhaps adjacent. As I blinked blearily and rubbed the gunk out of my eyes, I was pleased to see my phone on the little tray table next to the bed, and my spear leaning against it. I reached out to feel the haft, reassuring myself that it was still there. We’d need to redo my tattoo.
“Don’t try anything funny.”
Ebi had been standing very still on the other side of my bed, and my still-booting-up brain had skipped right over her as I’d taken in my surroundings. I would have jumped a little in surprise if I was more awake and less pumped full of drugs.
“…Hi, Ebi. What—” I yawned. “What constitutes funny?”
“Pumping yourself so full of green ripple you turn into an avocado?”
I glanced down at my arms. Still human skin down there, even noticeably healthier-looking, less red and raw than the mangled results of my magical epilation. Vaguely disappointing, though not because I dreamt of becoming a pitted fruit. “Think I’m good on that front.”
“Time will tell.” She stood attentively over me, arms crossed, galloping her delicate fingers on the carbon-fiber shell of her upper arm. “How’s your pain?”
“Zero,” I confirmed happily. I was incredibly comfortable, no aching pain in my foot, none of the frostbite I’d inflicted on my hands, not even the ghosts of aches from whatever I had done to my muscles in those bursts of superhuman speed. “You’re giving me the good stuff.”
“Oh, yeah. Dipping into Amane’s supply.”
“I take it she’s alright?”
“Eh.” Ebi’s digital face twisted in annoyance. “She’s fine. Awake. Mobile and healthy as she can get. There was a spooky moment when we were getting her set up in here, but weather’s been clear enough outside of that. She’s a few rooms down from you.”
“But?”
“But her prostheses and mantle are fucked for the time being. Self-inflicted, I’m told.”
“Something like that,” I winced, feeling guilty even though Amane had made it quite clear that she knew the risk. “Glad to hear she’s alright, though. Yuuka?”
“Damn, you actually give a shit?”
I mustered the energy to glare at the robot.
She sighed, which sounded suspiciously like an audio clip recorded directly from Alice. It was a little weird that I could identify the origin. “She’s the most messed up of the three of you, but she’s alright. Some broken ribs, a lot of bruising, a really messed-up bunch of hemorrhages around her eye, and right now, we’ve got her on the same red sensitivity alert as Amane, but nothing that won’t heal. I’ve had her on eightfold.”
I looked up at the ceiling, processing this information. I let myself be relieved she was fine, mostly past the point of bad blood after the life-or-death circumstances we’d shared—but the same sentiment did not extend to the person who’d roughed her up so badly. The last thing I’d seen of my stalker had been Alice embracing her and calling her sister. Was it all water under the bridge now, despite the fact that I’d traded blows with Takagiri to stop her from killing Yuuka? I frowned.
“Where’s Takagiri? Uh, Kimura? You know what I mean.”
“Too many questions for somebody on morphine,” Ebi deflected breezily, waving her hand.
My frown deepened at the evasion. I was still feeling sluggish, but the comfortable kind, and I wasn’t exhausted or distracted by pain, so I had the wherewithal to briefly run through the information revealed to me before I’d passed out.
Alice was trans. So was Takagiri. Both were surprising. Alice had seemed forgiving, and it was easy to imagine Hikanome would be much less so, given that they’d already labeled Kimura a traitor, and from Ebi’s response…
“Ebi, by any chance, is she here? On this very floor? You’d tell me if she were, right? Because we’re such good friends?”
“…Noooo,” Ebi lied, clasping her hands behind her back. “Did you know that we’re footing the bill for the damage to the park? It’s over three billion—hey, no, stoppit—”
She rushed forward to hold me down as I tried to sit up. That turned out to be mostly unnecessary; pain-free though I was, my muscles still felt like jelly, and I only really managed a sideways half-flop. I wiggled back into a more dignified position to address her seriously.
“Ebi.”
“Ezzen.”
“She attacked me. All this?” I waved weakly to indicate my state and the Radiances somewhere down the hall. “Her fault. She was trying to kidnap me! And you just have her posted up the next room over, like she won’t do it again?”
“She won’t,” came Alice’s voice from the door.
I looked to see her leaning into the doorway. She was wearing one of Amane’s hoodies and a ragged, irritated expression on her face…and not much else. Probably some very short shorts hidden under the hem, but it was clear she was not dressed to go out or look pretty. She was pressing an ice pack against her forehead.
My pique softened slightly. “You okay? Uh—”
“Fine. Takagiri isn’t a threat to you anymore.”
That sounded a little morbid. “…You didn’t kill her, did you?”
“We’re not killing her, Ezzen.”
I winced. “Not what I meant. Uh—I’m glad she’s alive, really. But does she have to be here?”
Alice hesitated, glancing briefly down the hall, before sighing. “Ebi, clear out, and soundproofing on, please.”
“You got it.” The robot walked out of the room. I noticed she didn’t have feet at the end of her shins; the leg just tapered to a point. Were those new?
Once she left and closed the door behind her, Alice grabbed the visitor’s chair from the corner of the room and hauled it to my bedside. She dropped herself in the seat sideways and leaned against the back, rubbing her head and wincing.
“We’re holding onto her while she recovers and things simmer down a little. It’s a mess out there.”
“And you know she’s not going to attack me again…how, exactly?”
“Because she’s on our side against Sugawara—ow, fuck,” she groaned, shifting the ice pack around.
My worry and anger about Takagiri were derailed by Alice’s pain. She’d been mantled up for nearly the entire fight, which meant it probably wasn’t a battle wound. More likely, given her magical expenditure, it was her body itself.
“Dragon-ka?” I hazarded.
“…Some.”
“Say more.” I sat up a little. This was something I could solve, maybe, make myself useful.
“It’s…my tail’s growing,” she sighed. “And I’ve got a killer headache, though I don’t know how much of that to attribute to some new mutation versus just…all this. The Ministry’s been breathing down our necks about damages and the fucking cleanup and Miyoko’s been very suggestive that they’ll sell us out to the Peacies if we don’t, which I can only hope she’ll turn around on once we explain Takagiri’s situation—” The air on her side of the bed was starting to heat up. “—plus the press wants Hina to make a statement—which I’m absolutely not letting her do—and we have to delay all the ‘make a splash’ summer merch because Christ that would not go over well and the guys I sent to see what the hell’s going on with Sugawara have gone missing and it’s all…sorry,” she muttered, tamping down the warmth before it could flare any higher. “I’m overworked.”
“Uh. You’re fine.” She was very much not fine in the more general sense, but to be honest, I’d only been half-paying attention to most of the rant; I was much more comfortable trying to figure out what her headache might entail mutations-wise than grappling with the political quagmire Todai now found itself in. “Horns?”
“Fuck me, I hope not.” She rubbed her face with her free hand, trying to regain her composure. “That’s what you’re stuck on? Not the public relations debacle?”
“Trying to stay in my lane,” I shrugged. It beat talking about Takagiri’s presence…or Hina. “I wanna…help with what I can.”
“Yes, fair enough, that does sound more your speed. Er—I appreciate it. And sorry for the language, really, it’s just all such a mess.” She looked at me more seriously, a little more of her public face reconstituting. “Don’t feel obligated to help us clean this up—I wouldn’t blame you for having had enough of this by now, honestly. I understand if you just want out.”
I eyed her. “Are…you saying I should leave?”
Did they want me out of their hair entirely now, after being essentially the trigger for the entire event? Had I finally crossed the line from asset to liability, and now Alice was subtly trying to hint at me that I should take my leave and head off for the Spire before the political situation disintegrated further?
She shook her head hurriedly, then flinched and moved the ice pack to the other side of her head. “Ow—no, absolutely not! You’re welcome here, always.” A curious look came into her eyes as she met mine. “Do…you understand why?”
I looked at her blankly.
She sighed. “Okay, no, I guess not.” She shifted in the seat. “Let’s start from the beginning. Where I probably should have, honestly, instead of giving it the walkabout for two weeks.” She cleared her throat. “Ahem. I’m trans.”
“Right.” We stared at each other for a moment as I searched for something else to say. This was a harrowing, precarious topic, and regardless of how this factored into Todai harboring somebody who’d attacked me, I felt obligated to be respectful. Star would have taken my head off otherwise. “Um. Since when?”
So much for being respectful. I would have to bury myself somewhere far from civilization.
“Um,” she fumbled, also caught off guard by my inability to hold a conversation. “Since…since two years before the firestorms. A few months after I met Hina,” she clarified. “But it starts before that, back when I was just a gross little larva of a person, barely sentient and stuck on the wrong side of a thick eggshell. You know?” She cringed, then raised a hand to forestall my idiotic reply. “It’s just…okay. Once upon a time, I was a boy who didn’t like mahou shoujo.”
My brow furrowed. “You’re literally on the Wikipedia page.”
“Yes.” She managed a smirk at that, some pride shining through. “But until I was fourteen, I thought it was stupid girl shite. To be clear, I was always a total nerd, but I was way into all the boy manga, for boys.”
“Ah. That, uh, didn’t last.”
“It did not,” she agreed. “I started to develop a…private fascination with magical girl media—er, no, that sounds much more pornographic than it was. It wasn’t like that—but of course I was afraid my peers—again, remember, secondary school boys—would make fun of me for it, so I…never told anybody, for fear of being labeled a weirdo and a pervert. I was ashamed of it. Parents didn’t help,” she groused. “And of course it was Hina who found out about it,” she grinned.
“Ha.” I didn’t particularly want to be reminded of Hina’s antics right now, but I tried not to let that show.
“Quite. Showed up at our door complaining I was way overdue to invite her over—nevermind that I’d never told her my address—and the first thing she did upon entering my One Piece-plastered room was dive for my laptop and check the search history. And because she’s Hina, there was no judgment whatsoever, and suddenly I had a friend to talk about this stuff with, and the floodgates opened pretty soon after. I figured out that the shame I was feeling was repressed envy for those girls, that I didn’t actually like being a boy. Hated it, in fact.”
“Huh.”
I am a little ashamed at past-me for being so reserved, so timid. Perhaps if I’d been more involved, asked more questions, I wouldn’t have needed Alice to spell it out for me so completely, as she was about to.
“—So by the time the firestorms happened, I knew I was a girl, but hadn’t…done anything about it. I mean, I was a sixteen-year-old boy-apparent in Japan, at a school with gendered uniforms and strict parents. All I could do was try on Hina’s clothes and feel my body hair grow in, feel my voice get deeper, week after week, dreading it. I stank, too, eurgh, glad to be rid of that.” She grinned.
“Um. Girls can smell.” Truly an incredible point at which to start being the peanut gallery, out of the wealth of details she’d just given me.
The grin rotted to an awkward smile. “Sure. True, yes, fair point. Girls can smell. But not me, because I transitioned with magic.” She raised a hand, curling and uncurling her fist in the same way I’d seen Hina do a few times. “This body wasn’t human-standard even before the dragon reared its head.”
I gaped, realizing the implications. Alice was saying she’d solved the problem that Star and I and countless others, plus real researchers, had met only dead ends on. “But—how? Even the cutting-edge stuff was nowhere near parity with traditional methods before the crackdown, and—”
“Oh, Ezzen,” she sighed. “Here’s where I start being a hypocrite. This body? These?” She reached down and tugged on her hoodie to emphasize her boobs. “Blood magic.”
“Still impossible,” I protested, trying to maintain eye contact. “People have tried.” I thought of everything I’d gone through with Star, long nights collating existing research and trying to extrapolate from it. We’d always come out the other end despairing—though her for a different reason than me. Right? “Tried quite desperately,” I added.
Alice stared at me as though I were an idiot. “With borrowed Flame. Sanguimancy, especially the mutagenic sort, is a totally different game for proper flamebearers. You know that firsthand.”
“…Okay.” I had to concede that much, given the changes presumably racing through my body as we spoke, even if I couldn’t really feel them right now. “Then what did you give up?”
“Nothing…I thought,” she clarified, again getting ahead of my interjection. “I transitioned on the 2nd of March, 2016, and it took three days of…have you ever seen Event Horizon?”
“I don’t watch anime.”
“It’s a movie, not an anime. What I mean is that it was impressively, disturbingly gory, and unbelievably painful, and then I was reborn anew, exactly as I wanted to be. Everything as it should have been, beyond what hormones or surgery could ever do, at least with the current tech, as you pointed out. Well, I still had to do some voice training, and there was learning makeup and fashion and all that—I’m getting off track. Since this was less than a year after the firestorms, we still didn’t really understand how blood magic worked, so I’d just thought that losing the, er, block and tackle, was enough of a price, given how much it had hurt. Besides, gender euphoria is a very novel emotion to feed the Flame—this was when Hina was really starting to explore her own options also, mind you, and she was having a great time with euphoria as a catalyst, so we really figured that I’d paid my price in full.”
“…But?” I prompted, before realizing where this was going. “Oh. But dragon.”
“But dragon,” she agreed with a sigh. “It’s wasted on me. Being a dragon-girl is—pardon my language—objectively kickass, and I’m sure there are lots of other trans people out there who would have been delighted for the Flame to do this to them—but for me, it’s a step in the wrong direction, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I’ll help—”
“I know, I know, and I’m so extremely grateful, truly,” she said hurriedly. “Let me finish. You know what would be worse than getting my ideal form and then having it slowly morphed into something else?”
“Dying?”
I was fortunate she didn’t punch me for that one. Instead, she leaned back in the chair and laughed dryly. “You’re really something, Ezzen. Worse than dying, depending on who you ask: having the power to undertake the kind of transition I did, but being trapped by circumstance so that you can’t. That was where Izumi Takagiri found herself. That is why I will give her whatever support and sanctuary I can. That’s non-negotiable.”
I glared at her for a long second while I tried to figure out how I felt about that. In the abstract world of ethics, I felt Alice was doing the right thing—and I could admit that my heart hurt for Takagiri, or at least for the abstracted idea of the horrible situation she was describing. It was eminently noble to help. But the actual reality of my situation, the things that had taken place the other day, made it hard for me to scrounge up sympathy.
“She attacked me. And Yuuka. Really didn’t seem very remorseful at all, frankly.”
“She was under massive duress. And we have a common enemy. Sugawara is active, somehow, and we know that thanks to her. Finding him is our absolute top priority right now, after keeping both of you safe. A flamebearer alone is a flamebearer who’ll get snapped up. You know that!”
I sighed. I couldn’t avoid talking about the politics any longer, apparently. “Hikanome’s not going to cover for her? Don’t they hate Sugawara too?”
“We…didn’t tell them about her situation yet. I think we will—Takagiri wants to, at least, but on her terms, once we’ve dealt with Sugawara. She’s tired of hiding. And…I want to believe that Miyoko and Hongo will ultimately be supportive of her, both for her sake and ours. It’d be best for her, and for Todai, because the situation is…well. The government isn’t happy, and neither are the Peacies. Hell, the Vaetna themselves might show up.” Before I could perk up too much at that, she reached out to put a hand on my leg through the blanket and gave me an earnest expression. “Listen, Ezzen—I’m not asking you to forgive what she tried to do. But you have to accept that she’s not evil, she was coerced, and we are not in the business of denying help to potential allies out of spite.” She sighed. “She’s not going to try to hurt you again.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay.” It took me a long moment to swallow my personal sense of victimization, in part because—well, if Takagiri wasn’t the enemy I’d thought she was, then the far more unrepentant instigator of the whole debacle was Hina. And I still really didn’t want to think about Hina right now. “I’ll…try to get along. Is she going to be…sticking around? Long term?”
“I don’t know yet,” she admitted. “If Hikanome want nothing to do with her even after we clear things up…yes, I guess so. Would you like to talk to her?”
“…Why would I?”
Alice blinked at me. She opened her mouth, closed it again, opened it again, and closed it again. Fish-like. She put down her ice pack and sagged against her chair. “Forget it.”
She’d rallied her energy to explain all this to me, I deduced; now she was clearly approaching the end of her rope, and I didn’t want to impose.
“You can go,” I insisted. “Don’t let me take up your time. Thanks, for, uh—telling me about you.”
She nodded, glanced at the door, then back to me, and lastly down at the chair she was melting into. It didn’t look terribly comfortable, but at least the seat was padded.
“Actually, I’m good here for a little while,” she decided. “I’ve needed a break to just…process it all, you know? It’s been an insane few days. I mean…even all the politics aside, we knew Kimura. Talked with him plenty at dinners and such. And Takagiri too,” she rambled. “I mean, her really only in a combat and espionage capacity, and we sort of presumed her dead, but she was a known quantity. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that she’s him, that she’s been him this whole time.”
She was mostly talking to herself, offgassing what sounded like some serious mental dissonance. I didn’t have to shift my understanding in the same way she did; I’d only met Kimura only a few hours ago from my perspective, and technically Takagiri, very briefly, hardly a week before that. While they did seem like very different people, vicious assassin versus reserved samurai—to say nothing of the fact that Takagiri seemed a solid twenty years younger than her male body—it was easy enough to just think of it like Takagiri using Kimura as a mask for the public. Ironic, given that she was the magical construct.
“Really advanced mantle,” I mumbled, then realized something. “Hold on. All your research into mantles, proxying LM for your real bodies—was that for the same thing she’s doing now? Like, before the blood magic, was the mantle the way you were going to have a female body? Why the switch?”
Alice blushed, gaze fixed on the floor. “…Yes, that was the plan. After the Vaetna released the glyph lexicon, Hina and I tried really hard to figure out how to give me a girl body. The LM-facsimile-and-neural-link trick came from Ai-chan, who was exploring that side of things for our transformation sequence and ways we’d be able to fight like magical girls. The ideas dovetailed. Blood magic just wound up being…better. More complete. And it makes sense that if Takagiri wasn’t able to make that transition due to all the fucked up societal norms and Sugawara holding it over her, she’d have picked up where we left off with the mantles. Somebody was going to, eventually.”
“You’re not worried she stole the designs? Or that they were leaked?” I shifted awkwardly. “Something something, opsec?”
She chuckled. “I don’t think that’s the case. The fact is that she’s been doing this for at least five years; I think she made some educated guesses the first few times we were seen in public, copied the basic principles, and has mostly developed in parallel to us. There’s a lot of open-source research into LM constructs, after all.” She ended that with a meaningful look at me.
I rubbed my neck bashfully and avoided the look. “I’m really not that big of an influence. It’s all collaborative, and we’re always ultimately working in the Spire’s shadow, so—”
“You’re a genius on par with Ai. And that’s…” she faltered, biting her lip, and took a deep breath, steeling herself to push through my deflection and self-effacing. “Ezzen, the heights and depth of your research into LM and magic in general is literally unrivaled among your non-academic peers. That’s why everyone wants you so badly. And you always deflect that it’s about the Spire and the Vaetna, but—is there really nothing more to it?”
I froze, a deer in the headlights. “I mean—uh…no? Not really,” I blabbered, then started to get an inkling of where she was going with this, in light of the previous conversation. “I’m…some of my friends have called me ‘dysphoric’ about the Vaetna, and emotionally…I don’t know,” I faltered. “I don’t hate my body that way.”
“Dysphoria is a lot of things. If you ask me, you’re quite clearly uncomfortable in your skin, and you want to be something else than what you are. Would it be inaccurate to say you yearn for it?”
“I’m ‘uncomfortable’ because I don’t talk about this stuff…ever, not out loud,” I jabbed. “It’s not a gender thing, if that’s what you’re trying to say. It’s, um, transhumanist, I guess?”
This offended Opal. A pulse of hot air rolled through the room as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “Genius in some ways, so very oblivious in others. Alright: do you know why Yuuka started being nice to you on Friday? After your haircut?”
I hesitated, remembering how they’d quieted her with a few stern words and the threat of Amethyst’s massive claw holding her head. At the time, I’d just assumed they’d convinced her to be nice to me with some mixture of cajoling, threats, and attestations as to my character—but given Alice’s current line of insinuations, a different theory came to mind, one that even I wasn’t so oblivious as to miss.
“You told her I was trans?” I gaped. “Despite the fact that I’m not. What the fuck’s wrong with you? That’s massively—”
I was interrupted by the clack of the tip of Alice’s tail striking the floor. She held up a finger.
“Ezzen, you freaked out so badly at a haircut that you did last-minute blood magic to undo it, and took off all your body hair in the process. That’s not ever a cis thing.”
“I—I did that after that conversation! That doesn’t mean I’m—”
Jesus Christ, past me.
Alice held up a second finger. “You dress like I used to, like you’re ashamed of your body and feel the need to hide it, like you can’t fathom a version of yourself that other people would want to see.”
I winced. “I’m not ashamed! It’s just…” I floundered. “Armor. Carapace. Like—like the Vaetna, damn it, you know this about me.”
“Uh huh.” She held up a third finger. “You’re already they/them on the forums, and you ditched your masculine given name within hours of arriving here. We had a whole talk about legally changing your name at Tochou.”
“That’s an anonymity thing.”
“You’re not online anymore.” She gestured around us. “Your anonymity died the moment you were flametouched, Ezzen. Just—if being called ‘Dalton’ upsets you that much, that’s a data point.”
My automatic flinch at the name was incredibly damning. She winced as well.
“Sorry. Do you see what I mean?”
“…I just want to be called Ezzen because it sounds right,” I sighed. “Because it’s the name everybody already knows me by.”
“That can be true without your deadname—and I’m going to call it that, if you don’t mind—causing a flinch response.” She sighed, looking tired. “Ezzen, I’m asking you to engage in introspection that you’ve been avoiding for…I don’t know how long, all alone in that room of yours. You have trans friends online, and I know you actually talk to them about gender stuff, from how you’ve been treating me and Takagiri. Have none of them ever brought this up with you?”
Star had, in fact, and a few others I trusted to that level. But the conversation had always ended with how I dreamt of going higher than that. Any kind of human wouldn’t be enough for me; I wanted to be more, to go beyond.
“Transhuman,” I muttered. “Not transgender, that’s what we decided. I want to be a Vaetna.” Why was I choking up? “Doesn’t that answer all of this…interrogation, to your satisfaction? Can’t that be that enough for you?”
“Is it enough for you?” Her tail tapped the floor again. “I’m not saying you’re like me, that your discomfort with your body has to mean you want to be a girl. There’s so much room for things in between or things that are neither, and transhumanism is far, far from being mutually exclusive with gender. I’d bet the reality is somewhere in the middle. Is that so farfetched that you’d simply dismiss it out of hand? Do you trust us—hell, I understand not trusting Hina about this, but do you trust me—that little?”
I stared her down, trying to quell the emotions churning in my chest—defensive anger at her directness, juvenile rebelliousness at the idea of trusting somebody with this. Logically, I could admit that she was right, these things didn’t have to be mutually exclusive. But something in my heart was endlessly frustrated with the idea of aiming lower. Maybe, just maybe, in a world without magic or the Vaetna, I’d consider myself nonbinary, but that felt like it’d be giving up on my dream. I didn’t want to be a different type of human, I wanted to be more.
But being more meant going down Hina’s path, it seemed, and I resented that, too.
A crumb of self-awareness loosened from the knot in my chest. Maybe, even if just as a temporary measure, a stepping stone, I could be a little more adventurous with what kind of human I was. Maybe it’d help everything hurt less.
“…Maybe I’m due for a little introspection,” I sighed.
Alice smiled. It was a warm, gentle thing, and it only grew wider as she heaved herself to her feet, strong legs fighting gravity to lift her girthy tail. She stretched her back, which raised the hem of her hoodie just enough for me to see that she was indeed wearing shorts. I quickly averted my eyes, like I was seeing something I shouldn’t—then caught that thought, examined it in a new light. I still didn’t want to ogle the woman providing my room and board, but the sheer panic that arose when I perceived the female body was…something worth examining.
Unfortunately, examining it led me back to the same thing I’d been trying to avoid since I woke up. I met Alice’s eyes again with some difficulty and a tiny bit of foreboding.
“I need to talk to Hina about this, don’t I? She’s…thought I was trans since the start, hasn’t she?”
Alice confirmed that with a nod, but her smile faltered. “I—yes, but it’s more complicated than that. And you do need to talk to her about it…but I’m not sure now is the time.”
I eyed her. “Why not?” I’d expected her to egg me on—heh—and encourage me to follow the momentum of my tiny breakthrough. “She being…especially Hina? If we have to have this talk, I feel as ready for it as I’m going to get.”
That felt good to say…until Alice’s smile dropped off her face completely, replaced by something sad and pained.
“Yeah, but she’s not ready. She’s doing…bad.”
“Bad?”
“Bad.”
Author’s Note:
Gemder 2: the gemdering! At last, the egg cracks, albeit in a hairline sort of way. Baby steps, Ez.
I’m always nervous writing these one-on-one, dialogue-driven chapters, but I think this one landed where it had to. There were a lot of ways for me to go about finally making Ez confront all his egginess, but I felt it was most honest for it to come from a direct conversation, as these things so often do in the real world. Let me know how I did!
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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If only getting back to reality were as easy as letting gravity drag me there. Even though we were supposedly ‘above’ the three-dimensional slice of the universe humanity calls home, the physics of the space beyond was a complex balance of countless other forces that overrode Earth’s familiar homeward pull. I was instead sent plummeting through the kaleidoscopic abyss.
I screamed for the first few seconds as Hina’s room fell out of view above me, pitch black from the outside. It was when my lungs ran dry and I gasped in a fresh breath that I realized that there was, improbably, still some air out here, though freezing cold and distinctly oily. At least I wasn’t going to die by asphyxiation after everything else I’d been through in the past few hours.
Aside from that, though, the abyss was a thoroughly hostile place, not at all meant for three-dimensional meat-creatures like me.
I call it the abyss, and it’s true that it was darker than even the emptiest voids of the night sky, the same kind of unnatural shadow that my Flame cast when I let it burn—but it was not truly empty, and I was not truly blind. I could see vast objects—the equivalent of asteroids, perhaps—and stranger shapes, some sinuous like Jormungandr or branching like the roots of Yggdrasil, others jagged arcs so vast and distant they could pass for confused horizons. I fell past shapes that did not seem to obey the visual laws of perspective and parallax, rippling in form as my view of them changed, distending, twisting, sometimes simply blinking in and out of existence in an instant or flickering between two different shapes.
The greatest wrongness lay below me, in the direction I fell. The shapes there were distorted in a way I can only describe as poisoned. There lay the only true colors in this place—an entire rainbow so scattered as to be random noise, the ruined and crushed-apart edges of the inferno in realspace being washed out here by the tides of ripple. So in a sense, I was still falling Earthward, but striking that border would probably be a worse way to die than impacting any of the mammoth objects blinking into and out of existence around me.
So, looking down as I hurtled ever closer to the chaos was a bad idea.
Unfortunately, so was looking anywhere else. The sights of this out-place inspired a nausea wholly unrelated to my acrophobia, and I understood why Hina had told me to close my eyes the first time she had brought me into her extradimensional hideaway. I needed to shut out the sickening view of the beyond—but when I tried, a whole different kind of terror burst forth in my subconscious. There was an unaccountable urge to peel my eyes wide open, to keep my head on a swivel, to be on my guard; a prey-animal instinct, a hundred million-year-old inheritance from some prehistoric rodent that found itself suddenly stripped of protective underbrush and left exposed to predators.
Of course, neither keeping my eyes peeled for monsters—that weren’t there—nor squeezing them shut in a vain attempt to deny my situation would have made my chances of survival any better. And the screaming didn’t help, but could you blame me? My composure was at an all-time low. I spent maybe thirty seconds falling through the space beyond space.
A new mass of darkness flickered into existence directly in my path, and I had all of one second to brace to be turned into a wet smear, not even enough time for one last attempt to spark my Flame that might avert the impact. But instead of becoming Ezzen paste when I struck the object, I instead dove into the universe’s largest dust bunny at speeds no human body was ever designed to go.
This felt as awful as it sounds. I couldn’t tell you what kind of stringy particulate made up the accumulated mass, only that it was dry and unbelievably filthy, and it rubbed excruciatingly against my exposed skin as my momentum carried me through the cloud, gradually converting the speed of my fall into friction burns. At least my clothes somewhat shielded me, though a poor excuse for armor. Bits of the filth stuck to me as I went, awful little cobwebs that threatened to invade my mouth. I was terrified that I would come to a tangled stop while still inside, and then I would suffocate, or otherwise simply be stuck here for who knew how long, lost in the void.
Thankfully, I punched through the other end of the disgusting mass. My fall turned to a lazier drift, and then at last, I came across a real object upon which I could land, something bizarrely familiar and maybe even more displaced than I was: a chunk of bona-fide driftwood out here in the abyssal sea. I thought it was a mostly intact fragment of one of the trees that had been caught in the inferno’s edge, but that was impossible; it was far, far too large, easily twice the size of the largest trees on Earth, practically a skyscraper of wood. Maybe it wasn’t an Earthly tree at all, which raised questions I was in absolutely no condition to consider at the time.
Regardless of its origin, I will be eternally grateful to fate or whatever other serendipity brought me to it. I half-landed, half-impacted the piece of wood, scrambling to grab hold of the crags in the bark before realizing that wasn’t really necessary.
I laid on the uncomfortable bark, suddenly too tired to even pick out the remaining clumps of filth from my hair and clothes and wanting to just rest here a while—I didn’t know how long I had until this new surface would abandon me, but my body didn’t care. My muscles had had enough action and pain for one day, burning in protest from how I’d pushed them so far with the Flame. Surely, I could just stay here for a few minutes and rest, wait for Hina or one of the others to swim-fly out to me and retrieve me after they’d won, which would be soon. We’d hopefully taken Kimura out of the fight, after all, and I’d struck Takagiri with a blow very similar to the one that had taken Yuuka’s mantle out of commission. I was in no condition to rejoin the skirmishing.
But, my rational mind argued, I still had to get out of here. As much of a boon as the gargantuan driftwood felt like it was in the moment, an island of distorted familiarity and something that at least passed for solid ground, simply lying atop it didn’t actually change my situation. I was no more protected from the freezing cold or the almost-too-thin air, and every moment we continued drifting out here still increased the odds I would die by some incomprehensible interaction with one of the other vast, dark objects overhead. I needed to get back to Earth.
How?
The problem was that I had no idea where I was. I could still sort of see the edge of the inferno, that most-fucked up of horizons containing the only splashes of color visible. It lay in all directions, since I was still technically on the inside of the bubble. That perimeter, that chaotic storm of ripple, remained the most dangerous of all, not a way out or even a useful landmark.
Pain and exhaustion warred in my body as I tried to think my way through it, crunching through everything I knew about my situation and the more general principles of fourspace navigation. It was cold comfort that this “side” of the outside was actually the less dangerous of the two, compared to going “down” from realspace. I stared up into the darkness with its churning shapes, feeling very small and starting to get overwhelmed.
For one, I didn’t even know how to maneuver across the fourth dimension; I fundamentally lacked the intuition for it as a simple three-dimensional creature. For two, even if I could move in that direction, re-intersecting with the main area of reality was not something to be done lightly. That Hina could do so with abandon was a sign of how far her anatomy had diverged from a typical, three-dimensional human body. I’d probably explode from a kind of dimensional depressurization even if I didn’t just pulp myself on impact. For three, there were more hazards to navigation than the simple risk of messy collision. Portions of outside-space were known to be curved in strange ways, and if I stumbled into one of those, I could wind up going in completely the opposite direction and not even know it.
And all that was to say nothing of the lingering feeling that I was exposed to things adapted for this environment that would view me as a snack—like Hina, noted some cynical part of my mind unhelpfully.
What about landmarks? I knew—in theory—how to use magic to calculate my location relative to a known reference point, and that would at least solve the problem of being lost; it was actually a fairly straightforward calculation, an almost idiomatic operation with {LOCATE}. But that wouldn’t work for me, because unlike every other flamebearer in the world, I didn’t have even a single persistent lattice of my Flame sitting somewhere in realspace to use as a reference point for that equation. My wig was made of my Flame, but that was right here with me, merged onto my head. When I’d been tugged out of reality in the first place, it had been via my hair, which probably meant something of significance, but I lacked both the energy and the analytical toolkit I’d have liked.
Just to cover my bases, I brought my aching arm to my head to spin a few strands of the oddly bright hair between my fingers. It felt…like hair, no great revelation there.
“Don’t suppose you have any hidden secrets to get me out of this?”
Unfortunately and unsurprisingly, the hair didn’t answer. At least the extreme isolation meant there was nobody around to catch me talking to inanimate objects. Did my hair even qualify as an inanimate object, now that it was apparently merged with me? That made it more like talking to myself, really. At least my spear would have solidly qualified as a separate companion and would have made me feel a little safer from the instinctual feeling of being exposed, but it was back in the grass on—
On Earth.
A jolt of adrenaline accompanied the realization, and my Flame shifted in my chest as it felt hope electrify my system. My hand reflexively went to my left forearm, where my tattoo conspicuously wasn’t. I didn’t want to find out what would happen if I attempted to recall my spear to me at such a distance, in this space outside reality, but there was still an inherent link to the lattice embedded in my arm, and that gave me options. I just had to shift some parts around, re-weave the magic in place like I’d done in that moment I’d anchored myself with my prosthetic, so that it would point the way home.
Easier said than done. I didn’t dare try this with blood magic, not out here; reopening the old cut on my arm in this unnatural cold and strange atmosphere felt like it’d be gambling with my life even more than I already was—and my instincts were warning me against it, too, saying that whatever was out here would be able to smell my blood in the water. Irrational, of course, especially given that lighting up my Flame to do it manually would be the equivalent of a beacon around here anyway, and moreover there was nothing alive out here to hunt me.
That’s what I kept telling myself as I tried to ignore the shapes moving in the darkness. They were just debris.
Manual re-weaving it was, but the conditions were abysmal. My Flame was infuriatingly sluggish to ignite, seemingly out of energy after my stunt to strike Takagiri, and the act of forming it into thread in the abyssal cold stung my fingers with frostbite, making my already poor dexterity even more stiff and cumbersome. I was starting to shiver, too, and that made it even worse. Why was my Flame so cold now, when it had been searingly hot when I’d been pushing it through my body? But I couldn’t split my attention between a simple heat-generating lattice and my attempt to find my way home.
It felt like it took minutes to simply spin my Flame into usable thread. Then I had to feel around for the weave in my arm, an awkward process halfway between feeling with my fingers and trying to pay attention to the not-quite-pressure my Flame exerted as it responded to the space in my arm where the thread lived. After that, I had to partially unwind and loosen the lattice so that I could stitch in more of my thread, but not too much or the whole binding would decohere and then I’d be stuck.
It was slow, delicate work, and now I really did feel like I was torturing my Flame with how it was being crudely contorted. I whispered apologies as I wove, which rapidly devolved into a kind of prayer for survival, a mantra I could focus on to stave off the pain and cold and just keep going.
Unfortunately, my body failed before my willpower did.
My fingers turned blue, eaten through by the cold. The shivering became worse and worse until attempting to work the thread with the necessary precision became hopeless, fingers pathetically twitching against my forearm, so very cold. Yet simultaneously, I could feel myself getting hot—the final stage of hypothermia. I was going to die of exposure, not be eaten by some monster of the void. Salvation did not lie in more useless fiddling with my tattoo.
The cold brought a dream-like haze as I began to die.
In that fugue state, on my way to the final sleep, a memory bubbled to the surface of my mind. An action, divorced from context. I let the thread in my fingers decohere back into Flame and engulf my hand, and then reached out toward nothing in particular, as I’d done once before, in another space beyond space, in a dream. And as I had then, I touched…something. Resistance, a barrier I could not see or even truly feel. With my muscles failing in the deathly cold, sweat freezing on my brow and in my armpits, I reached out as far as I could, pushing, desperate for survival.
Take me home, I pleaded with my Flame.
And my hand brushed something else, something solid, something rough and round and cylindrical. I grabbed the haft of my spear—and something grabbed my wrist. I was yanked forward, through, out—or perhaps back in.
Then there were arms around me, something wonderfully warm and soft against me and rumbling deeply. Something warm moved through my chest as Hina’s Flame chased away the deathly cold. She hugged me close.
“Hey, hey, hey, I’m here. You’re okay. I couldn’t find you and I don’t know how you did that but you’re here now and I’m here and you’re okay—”
“Nngh,” I groaned in reply, sinking into her arms, high on the feeling of grass under my knees. The ground was cold, but it was a familiar cold, a natural one, not the abyss, and the air was clean and breathable and not oily and Hina was so warm. I snuggled as close to her as I could go, all our drama temporarily wiped away by the animal desire to seek the warmth of life. I didn’t let go of my spear, though. “Mm. Hi. Home.”
“Home,” she agreed happily, stroking my back.
As the worst of the cold began to ebb away, I regained some higher brain function.
“Is Yuuka okay?”
“Hospital. And you—”
“I’m here,” I groaned. “So it’s over? Please tell me it’s over.” I didn’t even have the energy to open my eyes at this point.
My reply came as an earth-shaking thud—which the Ezzen of a few hours ago might have panicked at, but at this point, I was just too tired to give a fuck from my dwindling supply. I sighed and forced one eye open to see that Amethyst had landed next to us. I blinked a few times, trying to get my vision to focus properly as I looked up at her glittering form looming over me.
She was untouched—not a scratch. She warbled what sounded like a greeting, but hadn’t turned to face me. Instead, she had her enormous arm-cannon raised, pointing at something away from us. Her spindly, digitigrade legs were set in a wide stance and dug into the dirt, acting as enormous stabilizing piles for the walking artillery. The chilly air momentarily dropped to the abyss-cold again as her cannon flashed, loosing a lance of purple light at something in the sky a few hundred meters away—where Takagiri was still brawling mid-air with Alice.
“…You fuckin’ kiddin’ me?” I slurred, wincing at the blast of fresh life-sucking cold caused by the weapon’s discharge and automatically huddling closer to Hina again. Frustration blossomed in my chest; I had really been hoping my blow against Takagiri would have taken her out of the fight, like she had done to Yuuka, but everything I’d done, the haze of exhaustion and pain I was feeling, hadn’t even been enough to stop her.
Hina sighed. “God, you look great.” Her hands groped over my body, and I winced in pain as fingers felt my abused muscles. Her hands were so wonderfully warm, but the pressure was unwelcome. I pulled away from her, frustration mounting.
“The fuck? We’re still in a warzone.”
The hands stopped. “Sorry.”
“Why are you with me and not stopping that?”
“Um. I can. Aren’t you cold?”
“…Hina.”
She winced. “Yep, sorry, on it.”
She disengaged her limbs from mine, stood, and catapulted away from me, bounding toward the fight. I groaned and sat back on the grass, still struggling for function but trying to refocus on the danger at hand. I squinted as Amethyst fired again, another flare of light and cold snap, and this time, I saw the shot make contact with Takagiri—but deflect off her wards. That jogged my memory, the last thing I’d been thinking about before falling into the abyss. I rubbed my head, trying to drill into the chaos and remember despite the way my brain felt like jelly. What had it been? We’d taken out Kimura, and then Takagiri had showed up and hurt Yuuka, and I’d grabbed the sword and lunged at her, and—
Right. No blood when I’d cut her.
“She’s a mantle!” I called out to Amane, realizing that I should have told Hina before sending her back in. “Um. Fuck. Tell the others that. Do you have, uh…anti-LM munitions?”
Amane’s spike-snouted head turned to look at me, and even though it completely lacked facial expressions, I could tell from how she slightly lowered her cannon that she was asking if I was sure.
“Yeah. Cut her with her own sword. Looked like…uh, what happened to Yuuka. I don’t know if you saw that. Pink ripple disruptors in…in the blades,” I rambled, vision getting wobbly again as I went through the events in my head. I gasped for air to keep talking. “Thought it would cut her connection with Kimura, but that’s not…” I gave up on trying to explain the full thread of logic in detail. “…point is, anti-LM.”
The mech-girl’s massive shoulders shifted in what looked like a sigh, then she projected a hologram of light at me. Translated text, like a blown-up version of what she usually did with her phone to talk to me.
Don’t have it.
“What do you mean you don’t—” I caught myself. “Why’re you using beams instead of the void munitions thing we did last week?”
I didn’t like invoking our collective sins at the oil rig, but I had to admit the situation was getting uncomfortably similar. But we were trying to destroy a construct, not kill a person—and besides, I had a plethora of bones to pick with my stalker at this point, even disregarding the fact that I was so very exhausted.
Because of the inferno.
“Oh. Right.” Of course using the highest-power options in her arsenal would be dangerous in this ripple-amplifying zone, so relatively close to squishy civilians. And me, but I was finding it hard to care about that part. “So that’s the best you’ve got.”
She shot another beam at Takagiri by way of confirmation, rather than nod or say something else in reply. It lanced past Hina, who’d leapt up several dozen meters and was now slashing at the assassin with oversized claws of a familiar, painfully bright blue. It was hard to make out much more detail at this distance, other than the periodic flashes of light as the flamebearers flew around and traded attacks, sword against claws against lasers, a properly spellsword-y battle. So anime. I might have appreciated it more if I were watching from the comfort of my chair, curled up in front of my computer screen with a warm mug of hot chocolate in hand.
That was the exhaustion and lingering wooziness talking. This wasn’t a livestream or a TV show—this was still life and death combat, and I was right there with them.
I squeezed my eyes shut once more, focusing, trying to picture the general diagram for the Radiances’ mantles, the basic template of commonalities from which each of theirs were customized. From what we’d seen of how well Takagiri and Kimura had dealt with the Radiances, it stood to reason that the former’s LM body was at least based on the same core principles, likely somehow copied or stolen—though seemingly upgraded, given that she was still fully functional despite taking a similar blow to the one that had taken Yuuka out. The idea that she was advanced beyond the Radiances themselves was a distressing prospect, but I had to trust that she wasn’t too far beyond, that the same chinks in the armor would apply if I could find any.
No luck. I was too scattered, and didn’t know the intricacies well enough off the top of my head anyway. But Amane surely would, as the one who had most extensively customized her own mantle and spent the most time in it.
“Amane—”
I was interrupted by a warbling, ringing noise, and opened my eyes to see that Amane was way ahead of me. Her gun had begun to change, and even through my exhaustion, I managed to extract a little interest at watching the massive arm-cannon reconfigure. The concentric focusing rings shifted around, their mounting spines rotating in place and producing those strange, unearthly sounds as the gemstones flowed. A piece underneath the barrel slid further back, up to her elbow, and more lumps of crystal emerged to mirror it. The result hardly looked like a gun. I eyed it warily; even without knowing exactly what she had done at a glyph level, the improvised, hacked-together nature of the design was obvious.
“That’s…not gonna blow up in your face, is it?”
It might.
“And if it does?”
Only me.
She dropped to one knee and aimed down the sights again. Well, the weapon didn’t have sights per se, but the message was still clear. Despite that brisk assurance, I edged away from her a little, scooting on the cold grass as though another meter of space between me and the jury-rigged weapon would make a difference if things went wrong.
The Radiances engaged with Takagiri got clear, signalled by some radio communication I wasn’t privy to. Hina peeled away by propelling herself straight down, and Alice jetted sideways. Takagiri seemed to understand what was happening, but instead of going to ground, she launched herself directly toward me and Amane, covering hundreds of meters in moments—
Amane fired with little fanfare. Unlike the clean beams of light previously cast from the tip of the barrel, there was no flash of light, no clear line of energy reaching from cause to effect. The first signal that anything had happened at all was a crack from next to me. Amethyst’s body fractured. Pieces of gemstone began to melt and slough off her titanic figure as the backlash of her weapon catastrophically damaged her mantle.
But Takagiri’s destruction was far more complete. Her body fractured mid-dive, and she screamed—a horrible noise, the same kind of broken, glitching screech that Yuuka had made after being stabbed. Then she shattered into a million shards.
Shards that were still flying directly toward us. She was weaponizing her destruction as a plume of twinkling death, a final blast of glassy shrapnel. It happened too quickly for me to do anything but cower uselessly, but Amane was faster. She lurched forward, putting herself in front of me, a disorienting purple blur that moved far too quickly for something so big and so heavily damaged. The shards struck her with hissing vengeance, like a storm of hail striking a glass roof, interspersed with more ear-splitting cracks as the impacts took their toll on her already damaged body. Then it was over, and silence reigned for a few moments
“Amane!”
Alice skidded to a landing next to me, white-hot jets of flame arresting her momentum, scorching the grass in front of her. She looked terrible, parts of her mantle cracked and warped with fuzzy distortion—but that was superficial compared to the horror show that was her girlfriend’s ruined body. She knelt by the inert mound of half-melted gemstone.
“Is—is it supposed to disengage?” I asked, heart pounding.
“Yes!” Her voice was distraught. “Amane, no, you can’t have—”
There was a snap as Hina appeared next to us. She was gently propping up Amane’s true body—sans prosthetics, eyepatch dark and inert—in one arm. Alice abandoned the destroyed mantle and rushed over to her. She shed her own transformation and wrapped Amane in a hug, babbling something full of relief.
Hina’s other hand was holding Kimura by the throat. He made no attempt to escape her grip, stoic and sullen.
Alice turned to him, still hugging Amane close, and said something in Japanese before switching to English.
“—explain.”
“I have nothing to say to you.” He sounded defeated, as exhausted as I was.
“Bullshit,” Hina snarled. “Why the fuck are you after cutie?”
“Sugawara wants him.”
“Sugawara’s in a fucking coma. You’re the one who helped put him there!”
“And you should have killed him,” he growled.
Hina exchanged a confused look with Alice. “…Okay? Then why the hell are you working with him?”
“He is in my dreams. I had no choice.”
Alice held Amane tighter. “Why not?”
He didn’t respond, looking down at the ground, avoiding all of our eyes. Hina brandished her free hand, blue sparks playing off her claws. “Talk.”
“Fine,” Alice sighed, waving her off, but there was something dangerous in her voice. “We’ll cover for you if you give us the names of everybody who’s working with him. Where’s Takagiri?”
Where indeed? My brain still felt like soup, but the well-worn grooves of magic were still functional. The mantle couldn’t have been remotely operated across the inferno’s boundaries. And according to Hina’s nose…something finally clicked in my head.
“I think we’re looking at her,” I muttered.
Kimura raised his head and glared at me.
Alice looked at me, frowning. “Ezzen?”
“She’s his mantle. You’re my stalker,” I declared, staring back at him, too tired to be afraid. “The same weapons. The same tricks. Bailing each other out at the last moment every time. Hina says you smell the same, and she only named you two when she first showed up. Nobody else could have been operating the mantle from inside the inferno. More advanced, too. Both bodies at once?”
Alice had gone very stiff, looking from me to him. After a long moment, Kimura’s expression broke into a vicious smile, and instantly, my suspicions were confirmed. That was the same expression I’d seen Takagiri make. The anger, the loathing. He turned the hateful countenance on Alice.
“He’s smart. And I did it better than you,” he spat.
Alice met his eyes. I expected her to snap back at him, for the air to heat up in a display of imperious anger, but she looked—so sad. She said something softly in Japanese. He laughed dryly and spat something back at her. She made a sound, a strangled yelp of shock and horror. Hina whined and dropped him.
“No,” she breathed.
Kimura knelt in the grass, coughing, then sat, resigned and angry, with none of the poise he’d had before.
“They won’t understand you,” he told me. “They will use it against you. It will end like this for you as well.”
I was lagging way behind the conversation. “Use what against me?”
“He blackmailed you,” Alice interrupted shakily, horror in her voice. “Sugawara. That fucker. God, no, you should have—”
“You do not understand—”
“You could have told us!” She was…crying? Her voice was hoarse, and she looked terribly shaken, and I still didn’t get why. Stupid. “You didn’t…this didn’t have to happen. We would have helped you.”
Confusion flitted across Kimura’s face, before being covered again by anger. “How could you?” he challenged. “You don’t know what it’s like to live like this. You perfect fucking mahou shoujo.”
“Oh my God,” Hina groaned. “He doesn’t fucking know. Alice—”
“Mm.” She shakily separated from Amane and stood. Hina hopped over and took her place, settling between me and Amane. I sagged against her, muttering into her neck. “I’m lost.”
“Cutie,” Hina sighed. “Don’t you get it? Seriously? She literally said it straight to you.”
“Uh.”
She shifted. I felt her poke my forehead. “How are you so—okay. Cutie. Ez. If Takagiri is his mantle, why’s she a girl?”
“Because…the design is copied from you guys, and changing the—”
“No! Fuck, you’re even denser than she was. We gotta talk about that later,” she muttered. “Just—look.”
Baffled, I watched as Alice approached Kimura. He let her do so, no more fight left in him, just simmering resentment. His expression turned to complete confusion when she knelt and hugged him tightly.
“We will help you. I promise.”
“…Doushite?” He sounded lost.
“Because—I do know what it’s like to live like this. You’re not alone, sister.”
Hina pointed at them. “That’s her. This is what Sugawara was holding over Takagiri to make her do his dirty work. She’s trans. They both are. Get it now?”
Oh.
Oh, of course.
I looked at the two women hugging each other. Takagiri looked back through the eyes of the old man she was trapped inside. She was sobbing as Alice held her—I had the unaccountable urge to cry with them. Something tight had grabbed my heart.
Trying to process the cocktail of emotions and implications overtaxed the last dregs of my energy. I fainted with tears running down my cheeks.
Author’s Note:
Thus concludes the debacle at Hikanome’s cookout: with a glimpse of what lies beyond the veil, heavy artillery, and a gender reveal or two. Gemder reveal. Get it? Because Todai’s whole theme is g—
Anyway. Sunspot says trans rights! Moreover, Sunspot has always said trans rights. I invite you to go back and reread the story with the knowledge that Alice is trans, and pay attention to how that colors her interactions with Ez. You’ll be wondering how you missed it the first time.
Extra huge thank you to the beta readers for helping me refine this chapter and get everything just right. Cass, Zoo, Maria, Penguin, and Zak, you all rock.
Three more chapters until we’re done with the arc: 2.17, 2.18, and the story’s first interlude. And, of course, then there’ll be another big author’s note post where I’ll be talking about character inspirations, the writing process, and some exciting stuff in the works for arc 3!
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!
Of all the Radiances, Yuuka seemed the most universally useful. She was nearly impossible to catch by surprise. Even though she hadn’t foreseen Takagiri escaping the first trap, she’d still been able to avert the magical backlash and gotten it right the second time. I didn’t know much about strategy, but it was clear as day that foresight—precognition, divination, whatever you wanted to call it—was a game changer, the furthest thing from a liability.
At least, when it worked.
“Didn’t fucking see him. That’s all I’m supposed to do, and I didn’t fucking see him. I didn’t see him and now I went down and we’re going to lose and it’s my fucking fault.”
“Hey, Yuuka, no,” Hina urged, scooting closer toward her. “C’mon, we’ve talked about this. Stuff goes wrong! It’s never just your fault.”
“Fuck you. You want to take some of the blame? Sure: this wouldn’t have even happened if you hadn’t fucked everything up! We could have figured this out, gone straight to Sugawara, cut his fucking throat and put all this back in the dirt. But you had to put fifty thousand people in a fucking inferno and you didn’t even get them, you stupid bitch. Why? For him?” She jabbed a finger at me. “And now you’re just gonna stay here and chew on his fucking cock instead of fixing the mess you made?”
She had returned to the vitriol that had characterized our first face-to-face interactions out of anger—and she had a right to feel bad. She even had a right to blame Hina for this whole situation. But that last part? I’d hoped she had come to think a little more than that of me over the past few hours. That got me mad enough to raise my voice in return, speaking over the growl rising in Hina’s throat.
“Chewing on my—no, absolutely the fuck not,” I blurted, then found an actual counterargument. “You’re right, this has gotten to be a total shitshow, and we’re going to fix it. It’s one flamebearer and an…assassin? Whatever she is, there’s four of you, even if your eye isn’t working.”
“It’s not just about the fuckin’ eye,” she grumbled. “They’re ready for us. Those swords cut right through my mantle. And they’re maneuvering well enough to avoid her—” She indicated Hina with a sneer “—she can’t even tell them apart! They’ve been planning this for who-fuckin’-knows how long, and we’re not ready, and innocent people are going to die even if we win, and Alice’s gonna overdo it—”
“Yuuka,” Hina pleaded. “It’s all gonna be fine! They have it under control, you know they do.”
“Do they?” I asked, growing more unsure at the fear and desperation in Yuuka’s voice. “It was looking bad. I, um, don’t really know how this is supposed to go, but…”
“They can’t get you,” Hina soothed. “That’s what matters.”
“He’s not all that matters,” Yuuka snarled. “Fucking Christ, Hina, how can you give so few fucks about everybody else?”
Hina didn’t have an answer for that. I hesitated, then found my voice, trying to meet Hina’s blue eyes.
“I—she’s right. There’s more at stake than just me. There are people in the crossfire and…” As she met my gaze blankly, my heart sank. This wasn’t the right angle to take with her. “You don’t care about that, do you. Not about the humans.”
“You matter more, cutie.” Her voice was soft, earnest. She reached out to me, trying to gently hold my scarred hand.
I pulled away. “No, I don’t. How can—how can you say something like that?”
“Just how it is.”
The thing sitting next to me no longer carried empathy for humans. Her entrance had shown that, but it was far more damning to hear it straight from her lips. Those same lips I’d kissed—a wave of disgust passed through me.
“So you’ll just sit here and do nothing.”
“I’m sitting here and protecting you.”
“That doesn’t make sense!”
“Ezza, there’s no point,” Yuuka sighed. “She doesn’t know how to change her mind.”
“No, there is a point. Hina, this is—you promised to make me more. And I agreed because being more means more ability to help people, to make a difference where it matters. That’s what I want, and you…don’t. You just care about power for power’s sake, because it…feels good, not for something important.” My voice fell to a tired, frustrated groan. “I thought you’d be better.”
That got through to her. She flinched, hunching her shoulders, looking chastised. “Sorry.”
Even through my anger, part of me hated making her so obviously upset. But the point had to be made. “If you’re sorry, then be better. Yuuka and I are—well, we’re liabilities right now. But you’re not. Go help.”
“Okay.” The hyena rose to her feet, ever-light.
“Okay?” Yuuka raged. “That’s all it fucking takes? Years of arguing and screaming at you to clean up your act and he just has to ask once and—” She made an angry noise, punching the nearest pillow. “Fuck you, Hina!”
I winced, but my girlfriend ignored her. “Stay right here, cutie, okay? Don’t—don’t be a hero and get yourself hurt, okay?”
“I won’t,” I replied, privately agreeing with Yuuka’s frustration but not wanting to let it show.
“Love you.”
She waited for me to say it back. Seconds dragged on as I tried to force the words out of my mouth, if only to get her to leave, to do her duty as mahou shoujo. Eventually, I did.
“Love you too.”
They tasted like ash, and I think she could tell I didn’t mean it. She smiled at me anyway. The space around her twisted, and she vanished.
Had I just broken up with my girlfriend?
Don’t think about it.
—
With Hina back in the fray, I should have felt a lot better about just staying here and resting. The room was warm and dimly lit; ostensibly safe. But an awkward atmosphere persisted. That final exchange with Hina had left us both too sullen to be interested in making conversation, and we were both, to put it plainly, rather beaten up from the last few hours of action. Yuuka was obviously mad at how little it had ultimately taken for me to convince Hina to get back out there, and in all honesty, so was I. The whole exchange sat wrong with me, and the acidic Bloodstone Radiance was absolutely the wrong person to talk about it with.
To avoid stewing in the knowledge that Hina and I might now be done for, I instead pondered magic. And there was a lot of magic to think about: Miyoko’s now-ruined bubble, my conversation with Hikanome’s three leaders, the general catastrophe Hina had wrought, and perhaps most significantly, the glimpse I had caught of Yuuka’s silver-sight. Her precognition was such that she could even protect herself from magical backlash. Absurd.
But without it, she thought of herself as useless, a liability, despite having the full suite of other magic all flamebearers could call upon and a decent ability to snapweave. The way she’d spiraled into despair was tragic—and painfully familiar. I understood feeling useless, feeling like a burden; that was my dominant emotional key since arriving in Tokyo. But I could still point out times I’d been useful: I’d saved Holton—though that was another moral nightmare—and helped set up the exit from this inferno, which hopefully people were using even now. And I’d maybe saved Yuuka herself from Takagiri’s follow-up blow. So I could acknowledge my own usefulness, brief and messy as it was—why couldn’t she?
Of course, I wasn’t nearly confident enough to just ask her that directly, especially not when she’d been so prickly just minutes before.
“How’s your eye doing?”
“Fine.”
A better response than the “fuck off” I’d braced for.
“Is it…functional, at all?”
“Why do you wanna fuckin’ know?”
That was more like it.
“Because…it’s unique? Because it’s the most powerful tool in Todai’s box of tricks.”
“Yeah? ‘S that why? Or are you trying to figure out when you can take my spot?”
“Huh?”
Yuuka looked at me angrily, then her face fell. “You saw what I saw. With my arm. You’re stealing my thing.”
“I wouldn’t put it—”
“I fucking bled for this! You can’t just get it for free because you’re so fucking special. No. Not the moment I become useless. It’s not fair.” Her voice was breaking. “It’s not fair.”
For a moment, anger overtook practicality. “That’s not what’s happening! I’m not trying to fuckin’…antagonize you over this. Christ.”
“…I know,” she sighed, her own anger boiling off as she shifted and sat up. “You just make me mad.”
“Well, that’s hardly fair, is it?”
“Nah,” she agreed. “Considering it looks like you just took my side over that thing’s. So I guess we’re just…cool now.”
I really didn’t want to think about Hina, so I ignored that comment.
“I’m not stealing your thing. I promise.”
“Okay. Eye’s…not actually doing that bad,” she admitted. “I know the gauze makes it look fucked, but it’s not really any worse than it was once we got the tunnel open. Just…can’t fuckin’ trust it anymore.”
“Because they can avoid it?”
“Yeah. And it’s been…” she waved a hand in my general direction. “Weird around you. I was thinking it over, y’know, stewing in my shit, and I was realizing that most of when it’s been on the fritz this week was when you were around.”
“Huh.” I collated that with the other stuff I knew as I looked around the dimly lit room, letting my eyes wander. “That…tracks. Your sight and my Flame interact…weirdly, yeah, that’s a good word for it. Hikanome said something along those lines, that I burn bright—like the Vaetna, even, that was the comparison they made. And yeah,” I preempted her scowl, “I know I’m not one—I thought they were bullshitting me, trying to exploit what I care about to con me into trusting them, but—they’re actually true believers, far as I can tell. So I think they’re right in some way.”
“Cool, so you make me even more useless, even if you’re not trying to steal my job. That supposed to make me feel better?”
I gave her a tired look. “Just talking it through, no need to snark at me.”
She didn’t apologize, but did cross her arms below her chest and look away with a petulant hmpf. I took that as a cue to continue talking.
“I don’t think I have your power, Yuuka. That’d be…really fucking unfair, yeah. The Flame wouldn’t just hand me something like that. So I think what I saw was just from…piggybacking on your ability. And I don’t know how that works, but neither do they. Even if they have contingencies for everything else you guys can do, that’s something they’re not prepared for. That’s our edge, if we can figure out how to use it.”
She side-eyed me. “Huh. What happened to not being a hero?”
I glared at her. “Do you want to help or not? Sure sounded to me like you did.”
“Course I do. Don’t talk to me like Alice. None of the fuckin’ ‘you’re a smart girl, Yuuka’ talking down to me shit.”
I avoided her eyes. I hadn’t intended to channel that sort of energy, but it was easy for me to slip into talking down to people—I blame years of interacting with others mostly via explaining magic.
“Sorry. I’ll treat you like an adult, if you do the same and help me with this.”
She was quiet for a moment, then shifted, raising her hand to the white bandages wrapped around her head. A little blade of magic sparked at her fingertip, and she sheared through the gauze, pulling it off. Her hair had been matted to her forehead and temple by sweat and the dried blood that had crusted around the socket of her eye. She wiped at it gently with some clean gauze, excavating her cursed eye from the messy biological damage surrounding it. Once revealed, the red-and-green gemstone glimmered dully, the low lights of the room catching the raised edges of cracks running along the surface, where the magical organ had fissured under the ripple shockwave of Hina’s initial impact.
“…Depends on what ‘this’ is. You got a plan?”
Despite the bloody mess dominating the right side of her face and the unsettling appearance of her cursed eye, I found it easier now to meet her gaze and actually found myself grinning. The expression soon fled my face after it became clear that she wasn’t quite willing to return it. I coughed.
“Maybe. The eye works?”
“Sorta.”
“…Yes or no?”
“Let’s go with no.”
Aha. “So when you said we were going to lose, was that foresight or just, uh, despair-spiraling?”
“Second. You got me.” She was surprisingly prompt about that; no guilty, embarrassed admission as she reflected on her brief meltdown. I envied her forthrightness. “Can’t see much of anything right now. Which is why I’m fuckin’—”
“Useless, yes, I got it,” I sighed. “Okay, then step one is: let’s fix that.”
I clenched my right fist and tugged on my Flame, letting it ignite into its natural, blindingly white burn that cast a kaleidoscope of too-deep, inky shadows around the room. It hurt, as usual, but there was something—else. I felt a little lighter as the fire ran through me. The consequences of what I’d done to save Yuuka, perhaps. It was secondary to the task at hand, though.
“How about now?”
Yuuka had flinched at the appearance of my Flame, squinting at it with her human eye and reflexively moving her hand to shield the lidless gemstone. She lowered the hand hurriedly, staring at the Flame intently, leaning forward. I’m ashamed to say that after hours of surviving the inferno and our adversaries, my libido was still operational enough to take note of how her boobs shifted with the motion.
“What the fuck,” she declared. “Easily.”
“Then—”
“—we’re not useless.” She took the words out of my mouth. I didn’t yet know her well enough to pick up on the subtleties of her expression, but the ghost of a smile was tugging at her lips as she extracted herself from the blanket and slowly, gingerly rose to her feet, stretching an arm out to the wall for support as she rolled her shoulders. This also moved her boobs, and I wondered if I could use my Flame to shut off the boob-noticing part of my brain somehow—at any rate, she looked fine. The catastrophic damage her mantle had taken seemed to not have bled over to her physical body, though she was moving slowly and gingerly as she finished stretching. “Nerd. You know what, fine. I don’t get what the fuck is going on with you or your Flame, but you’ve got one thing right: I can see. That’s enough. What are we gonna do with this?”
—
What did we know about our adversaries? I’d collated a number of observations from the skirmishing.
Concerningly, they were prepared to fight the Radiances. They both had swords that were able to damage and disable mantles; the mechanism wasn’t clear, but I felt pretty confident that it was some kind of pink disruption effect embedded in the blades themselves. Takagiri seemed able to at least partially avoid Yuuka’s sight, and both of them had displayed significant teleportation abilities, on par with Hina’s. With those abilities together, they’d already demonstrated they could take Radiances off the field. That was bad.
But they wanted to grab me. Alive, even.
“That’s good news for us, isn’t it? Even if they have me, they wouldn’t be able to abscond except through the tunnel, so they’d have to get past us anyway.”
“Silver lining for Hina’s mess,” Yuuka agreed. “It’d make more sense for them to cut their losses and ditch. Then we could focus on evac and all that. But they’re sticking around.”
Even though I’d helped rekindle her confidence, Yuuka’s eye still wasn’t giving us much tactical information. The inferno was still muddying things, and our distance from the actual site of combat—some twenty meters ‘up’ in the fourth dimension from realspace—had reduced her foresight to the broadest strokes and the very short term. We knew our adversaries weren’t going to quit the field in the next few minutes and not much else.
“If we were closer, actually in the shit, I’d be able to see the details,” she sighed. “But you said you’ve already got a plan, so let’s hear it.” She gestured for me to speak as she squatted in front of the mini-fridge. Like Alice’s constant hunger, it seemed that making heavy use of her eye incurred its own cost in metabolic demand.
“Uh. Right. Well, I was thinking about what Hina said. About how the two of them, er, ‘smell the same’. I don’t really know what she means by that, but…” I trailed off as I watched Yuuka extract an energy drink, punch open a hole in the side of the can with another fingertip-blade, and shotgun it. “That can’t be good for you.”
She waved for me to continue. I shrugged. I was hardly one to talk about diet.
“Fine. Based on that and everything else we know, I’m reasonably sure Takagiri’s enhancements are powered by Kimura’s Flame.”
Yuuka launched the empty can across the room and into the rubbish. They hadn’t been here last time, on my date with Hina; she must have added it for me. That made me feel guiltier about our last conversation—don’t think about it.
“Yeah, I’d believe it. Makes sense why she’d be lurking around, waiting for ya, if he’s the primary.”
I nodded. “So we cut the link, however it’s set up. They’ve got pink swords—I figure we can do better than that, some kinda tripwire setup. More like cheese wire, I guess.”
Traps came naturally to Yuuka’s skillset, after all. From what I’d seen of how she fought, it seemed like it’d be easy enough for her to put such a Flame-severing implement in a place she knew Takagiri would be. She grinned. “Taste of their own medicine. And once she’s out, it’s four on one.”
“Not three?” I attempted to raise an eyebrow, failed, and glanced away, reddening. “I mean you’re counting yourself back in it.”
“Yeah. I can do it, but I’ll have to be pretty close to set it up right, and that’s assuming I can even see her.” She scowled. “Any ideas on what that’s about, veeb?”
I groaned at the pejorative—if accurate—term. “Just call me a Vaetna fan. And—no. Silver suppression is solely a Spire thing, not some fuckin’ cult’s. I’ve seen a lot of new magic today, but I’m not gonna give them that much—”
I was thrown sideways mid-sentence. I hadn’t been struck; gravity was betraying the whole room, pillows and blankets and that empty can all flying to my right. Only Yuuka had stayed fixed in place, having {AFFIXED} herself in place on the floor that had become a wall. A jagged, snarled grin had spread over her face. “Guess we won’t have to go anywhere.”
I rolled onto my back and sat up again, raising my still-blazing arm into the air to light the room, hoping it would help Yuuka foresee the attack. It hurt, ice in my veins and fire on my skin, but that was all in my head, so I gritted my teeth and tried to push it further, to grow the Flame to cast as much light—literal or otherwise—as possible. It was all I could really do; with no spear and barely able to stand, it was between this or weaving, and I had much more confidence in Yuuka’s ability to snapweave than my own. Indeed, she’d already summoned her own Flame, globules of it floating out of her eye and coalescing into thread. I was starting to sweat from both the exertion and stress, which made all my raw skin hurt—though not as much as the Flame scorching my hand.
“Know who it is?”
“Kimura,” she muttered. “Was hoping it’d be the other one, but…move left. Edge of the room.”
“My left or yours?”
“Yours.”
I shifted hastily, scooting awkwardly until I was against the wall—formerly floor—adjacent to Yuuka’s. I put my non-flaming hand against it to steady myself and shakily rose to my feet; this was the wrong hand to optimally support my mangled right foot, but it was better than nothing. My repositioning had changed the shadows cast by my hand’s firelight, which Yuuka was watching rather than observing either my Flame or her own.
“Making any difference?”
Before Yuuka could answer, the room shook. Gravity didn’t change this time, but it felt as though something was striking Hina’s little pocket dimension from the outside, and I nearly fell again before digging my good heel into the wall-floor and stabilizing back to a reasonably upright position.
“Yeah,” she declared as the shaking subsided. “I got him.”
“That was you?”
“Uh, no. I mean—eh, fuck it, you’ll see.”
That boded—well or ill, I couldn’t say, but it sure did bode.
There was a screeching noise like the scraping grind of a catastrophically crashed car skidding to a halt. It sounded far-off and muted by the walls of the room. The ceiling—now the opposite wall from mine in our new orientation—began to bulge inward. My heart started to race as the sound increased in volume and the bulge grew, swelling with pressure from without. The magic-obsessed part of my brain considered this an ineffective way of breaching the presumably LM boundaries of Hina’s box compared to drilling or a more decisive blast of force—that would have been preferable to watching the pressure inexorably build and build as the sound grew closer, louder, clearer.
I glanced at Yuuka one more time, wordlessly asking for reassurance. She nodded, pointed at the bulge, and gave it a thumbs-down with her silver gauntlet. As if on cue, the grinding suddenly went silent, and the bulge stopped growing.
“Was that you?”
“Wait for it.”
The ceiling burst open. The screeching sound returned in an ear-splitting howl of noise as the temperature plummeted. On the other side of the wound was a kaleidoscopic darkness, distance and direction an incoherent jumble of non-shapes that my brain wasn’t equipped to process. I was looking down, down, down. Vertigo gripped me once again. Without any other way of defending myself from the void, I cowered against the wall and held my blazing hand out in front of me. Its light caught no shape in the darkness, only smoke billowing inward—
Something sparkled across the room. Glittering ruby dust scattered into the smoke, dispersing through it. The granules then burst into crimson Flame, banishing the darkness in a blood-red dazzle that blinded me for a moment. As I blinked away the too-red light, I beheld in my green-dyed vision a figure in robes stumbling backward toward the void from which he’d emerged. Kimura’s re-coalesced form found his footing after a few steps.
Yuuka stepped off the wall to stand between him and me, barking something in Japanese. She was unarmed, but her stance wasn’t that of a martial artist ready to throw down; rather, she held her hand out in front of her like I was doing, a ward to dispel evil—or a gun aimed at an old man. He raised his sword, undeterred, and called out to her in reply as they faced off, samurai versus gunslinger. Framed like that, it was easy enough to imagine the contents of their verbal exchange as cool one-liners: “No further” countered by “stand aside,” or something of the sort…undercut by how sad and tired Kimura looked as he shifted his grip on his sword, like he didn’t want to be here.
Nevertheless, he was the one to strike first. He stepped forward, low—I was surprised to see no sign of Takagiri’s devastating physicality, nor even the jarring, hard-to-follow speed I’d become accustomed to from the mantles. He moved like a human swordsman, stepping closer to Yuuka with grace and slashing at her. Yuuka didn’t have the overwhelming speed of a mantle either, but her precognition was more than enough for a fight like this. She stepped forward and backhanded the flat of the blade away with her gauntlet almost contemptuously while her other fist drove at his gut. One of his hands came off the hilt of his sword to push her fist aside, but he couldn’t fully step out of her reach, backed up against the edge of the torn-open bubble of realspace. He compensated by grabbing her wrist and jerking her even closer, trying to reverse their positions so that she would be the one stuck on the precipice—
Yuuka snapped her silver-clad fingers with a glassy, ringing noise. Kimura’s sword clattered onto the wall-floor, forced out of his grasp by a blood-red spike of LM that had punched straight through his wrist. Then she punched him in the face, and the fight was over.
To his credit, he didn’t just stagger backward off our little island of realspace, maintaining his footing despite the shock of the hole in his arm, but Yuuka’s shove did the trick. Kimura fell through the hole and vanished from view. I breathed a sigh of relief, releasing my Flame and slumping against the wall, breathing on my bone-chilled hand in an attempt to instill some fresh warmth in it. Yuuka scooped up the dropped sword and held it up to her eye.
“Pink?” I managed to ask, magical curiosity barely enough to overcome the systemic discomfort all over my body as the adrenaline ebbed away; the pain and the cold of the outside-space were sapping my strength.
“Think so.” She glanced over the edge, which was too much for me; I squeezed my eyes shut so I didn’t have to keep looking into the abyss. “Hopefully that’s the end of it. I’d be surprised if he can do the smoke bullshit again after the Embers of Ruby. The others will be here soon.”
“Good,” I gasped. I didn’t have the energy to ask about the name she’d given her move. “Can we—close this up?”
“Probably not—”
A whoosh made my heart rate spike again. I snapped my eyes open—and there was Takagiri, hovering just over the edge in front of Yuuka. She’d been seriously roughed up by the other Radiances since last I’d seen her, with one of her forearms sort of…blurry, like something had damaged her wards there. And she looked mad.
“Aw, fuck. Ez—”
“Yeah!” I was already reigniting my hand, yanking the imaginary lever to kickstart my Flame once more. I strangled a whimper in my throat as fresh pain lanced through my nerves. Takagiri launched herself at Yuuka, which was the worst possible moment for my body to finally start deciding it had enough. My vision began to wobble,and I sat back and tried to tune everything out and focus on keeping the fire lit—Yuuka didn’t have a chance otherwise, not without her mantle. Just keep the Flame aloft.
But Yuuka was losing anyway. She was no swordswoman. I heard the sound of blades clashing together once, twice, three times—then the sound of Yuuka grunting and her sword clattering to the ground as a blow landed true. She retaliated with a blast of crimson fire that shone blindingly even through my blurred vision. Takagiri stepped through the magical flame as it sparked against her wards and swung a fist at Yuuka, and time slowed down, as it had before.
My Flame sputtered, and the moment passed without giving Yuuka a chance to avert fate. The blow caught her in the chest and threw her against the wall with a thump. Her impact was only mildly cushioned by the pillows and blankets piled in the corner, and she slumped there, insensate—and probably with shattered ribs, if that blow was anything like how I’d struck Hina. Where was Hina?
Not here yet. We’d already taken Kimura out of the fight, and hopefully the other Radiances were already on their way through fourspace, and then it would be three on one. I just had to survive until then—but as before, Takagiri didn’t go directly for me. She lunged at Yuuka’s crumpled body with a shout, intent on finishing her off this time.
And once again, it fell to me to stop her.
I snuffed my Flame’s external manifestation so the world would stop spinning, and instead channeled it through my body. My muscles were electrified by magic, my vision cleared, and I felt strong as I lurched to my feet. As my mind raced and my senses came alive, some part of me recalled the strategy we’d discussed. I didn’t have to kill Takagiri; I just had to cut off her source of magic from Kimura. We’d speculated that was possible with an information-disrupting pink ripple attack.
Like the sword currently lying on the ground.
The world around me became a blur as I dove for the blade. I felt so fast as I scooped it up—and overshot, skidding toward the open hole. Oops. In that moment of desperation, something in my brain clicked. My flame rushed down my right leg, to my stump, and into the prosthetic. I rearranged the {AFFIX} that bound the mechanism to my foot, binding it to the floor, yanking me to a stop hard enough to have dislocated my hip if magic wasn’t reinforcing my body. It still jarred me for a moment—but only a moment. Then my other foot, the good one, regained its grip, and I used it to launch myself at Takagiri. She’d only just begun to react, still turning to me. None of the blurred speed from before; we were at the same pace now.
Of course, I didn’t really know how to use a sword; even at the same speed, she’d take me apart. So I pushed more of my Flame into my muscles and went faster. I had no idea how much of this my body could take, or for how long—but for a moment I was the lightning. I thrusted with the sword, center mass, my best impression of how I would with a spear. The blade pierced her wards, then her flesh, sinking into her belly and tearing out the side.
And in that long moment, I saw no blood follow the blade out of the wound.
Takagiri wasn’t an enhanced human. She was a construct. A mantle.
The moment passed. I slammed into the wall past Takagiri shoulder-first, not unlike how Yuuka had—but the impact was far lighter than it should have been. I thought that maybe I just didn’t feel the pain when juiced up on Flame like this—then realized I was being pulled away from the wall. My in-the-moment {AFFIX} had knocked loose whatever magic had been maintaining the room’s orientation. Everything tilted until ‘down’ became the abyss.
And we all fell.
Author’s Note:
It’s not a cliffhanger if it’s a cliff-faller, right?
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
This arc is officially longer than arc 1! Also, we’re as close as we’re gonna get to the in-story date this year! Hikanome’s ill-fated rally/festival is taking place on February 19th, 2022.
See you next week for the thrilling conclusion of Hina’s magical clusterfuck!
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Rather than dive into the crowd to go after Takagiri directly, Yuuka simply summoned her Flame once more, weaving quickly and carefully, never taking her eyes off the spot in the crowd where she had “seen” my stalker. I wasn’t having any luck seeing her myself, but that wasn’t a surprise.
“She’s not actually here yet, is she?”
“Nah. I’m thinking…four to six minutes.”
“You don’t know where she is between now and then,” I deduced. “But you don’t need to go after her if you know where she will be.”
“She doesn’t need to be as direct as Hina.” Alice answered from behind us.
I suddenly remembered my worry about her dragon transformation; it had been momentarily overridden by Yuuka’s callout of the threat. I turned toward her and got to my feet—foot—hurriedly, leaning on my makeshift crutch and scanning her up and down, looking anxiously for new mutations.
Radiance Opal was in her mantle, what I understood to be its default outfit: a short, pleated skirt that wrapped high enough around her waist to sit above the base of her tail, a corset that seemed practically moulded to her midriff, and a low-cut blouse held up by straps that crisscrossed over her chest before wrapping around her neck. She wore long, elbow-length gloves; those and her knee-high boots conformed to her limbs so tightly they seemed vacuum-sealed, like Vaetna carapace or similar low-profile armor, an impression aided by the engraved polygonal plating over her knees and elbows and the chunky earpiece riding over one ear. But any militarized aspect to the outfit was undermined by the lacy, yellow trim that appeared all over the outfit and the bejeweled, girly staff she carried.
Maybe it was just my personal sensibilities, but the ornate outfit made it difficult to think of her as a powerful VNT, a walking superweapon. I thought the businesswoman look fit her better; it was embarrassing to be standing next to her decorative getup in front of this crowd. But maybe that was the point? Hikanome’s people seemed to like it, judging by the renewed cheering coming from the crowd.
More importantly—since this was merely a decorative LM construct and not her actual body, what did that mean for her dragon-ka? At a glance, her slit-pupil eyes looked the same as they had before, and she hadn’t sprouted a snout or claws or any other draconic features. She still had her tail, even in this LM facsimile of her body; was that a sign of how immutable the magical limb was, or just an aesthetic choice?
“Ezzen?” She shifted her weight from foot to foot. “You’re looking at me the way Hina does.”
I blinked, blushed, and abandoned the inspection; she must have mistaken the way I was peeking between her legs at her tail for ogling. I’d overstepped the appropriate amount of looking at her body. Embarrassment triggered sweating, despite the chilly air.
“Um—dragon,” I blurted. “Dragon transformation. Dragon-ka. You took a minute.”
Alice shook her head hastily. Her white hair was longer than normal, but only the strands next to her cheeks were free to follow the motion; the back was done up in a very complicated bun clasped by yet more gemstones. I wondered whether the mantle calculated the hair’s physics in real-time with reverse kinematics or if it was some kind of pre-loaded animation. Maybe the latter, since she was oddly still outside of that; when she moved, it seemed deliberate, though not unnatural.
“Oh! No, nothing like that, I’m fine. I was just being careful and taking my time.”
“Oh. Good. Sorry.” After a moment of awkward silence, academic interest won out. “So, that wasn’t the threshold for changes? Do any changes cascade to your mantle? You still have your tail, does that have its own controls or—”
“Ezza,” Yuuka groaned. “Shut up. Trying to concentrate here.”
“And it’s classified,” Alice reminded me, eyes flicking toward the crowd. “Opsec.”
I winced, falling silent and sneaking a glance at how Yuuka’s work was coming along. The thread in her hand was coalescing into a…container, essentially, the schematics to create a box of contained space that would snap shut at a particular moment. Her eyes were still fixed on the crowd; the crystalline one on the right was bleeding more globs of Flame, which were flowing and arranging themselves into concentric floating rings. Lenses, I realized, in the same vein as how Amethyst’s arm cannon deployed.
“Your eye’s got some signal again?” Alice asked.
“Good enough. T minus three for Takagiri. I’ll grab her.”
“Wonderful. Word from Hina?” Alice directed that at me.
“No.” I bit my lip nervously, not wanting to fumble the conversation again. “We saw her getting, uh, tossed around a bit. I know she’s tough,” I clarified, forestalling Alice’s reassuring reply, “just…worried.”
Alice pursed her lips, which led me to deduce that at least the facial expressions were real-time recreations of their real bodies somehow, too diverse and subtle to come from a set of pre-animated options. In their shoes, I’d honestly have preferred to just display emotions with the push of a button, like how Ebi did—though my ideal would be essentially faceless, fully enclosed in carapace and emoting through body language and the tone inflections encoded in Vaetna-chatter. Alice was looking more confused by the second.
“Wait, she’s having trouble? Who was she fighting?”
“Um…didn’t see.”
“Then…it might have been Takagiri she was fighting, not Kimura. She’s the dangerous one of the two; Hina wouldn’t have issues dealing with him. Yuuka, you’re sure that Takagiri will show up here without being in the middle of grappling with Hina, or something?”
“I’d see that,” Yuuka confirmed. “Just her. Two minutes.”
I blinked. “Wait, Takagiri’s human and Kimura’s a flamebearer, right? How’s she the more dangerous one?”
“Kimura’s magic is mostly…well, administrative. He parcels out his magic to the high-level members so they can perform the standard Hikanome miracles. So he’s relatively weak and not a fighter. Takagiri, on the other hand, was one of Sugawara’s elite muscle. Nasty stuff—she was armed to the teeth with magitech and enhanced enough to fight on our level. And now that we know she’s alive, who knows what kind of stuff she’s gotten her hands on in the past few years.”
My anxiety was starting to spike again. That sounded—very bad. It was equal parts upsetting and validating to know that my instinctual danger response when I’d first met her had been accurate. “Then…should we be having this conversation on—the other side of the tunnel, maybe?”
“If it’d make ya feel better. I have her, though. One minute, Alice.”
There was a smile in Yuuka’s voice. She sounded so rock-solid, so certain, that for a moment Takagiri’s capture felt as sure as the rising sun. I blinked at the feeling—leftover white ripple?—and decided not to trust it on its own, glancing at Alice instead for reassurance. She shared Yuuka’s smile and gave me a nod, standing at ease.
“None of that should matter, not against Yuuka. Foresight is overpowered. But confirmation is good too.” She raised a finger to her earpiece and started speaking in Japanese. A chirping warble replied, barely audible to me from right in front of her. I was a little surprised I could hear it, actually—I’d have assumed the Radiances’ mantles were networked to one each other through ways you couldn’t casually eavesdrop on like that. Alice’s brow furrowed.
“Amane’s saying—Yuuka, matte, shimekona—”
She was cut off by the rasp of a sound like tearing paper. Yuuka clutched the lattice of magic in her hand, activating her trap around somebody in the crowd. A cocoon of light spiraled into existence, swirling up and around them and binding their limbs as she manipulated the thread to smother and restrain, yanking them forward out of the crowd and forcing them to their knees. Alice leapt forward into a glide, hovering over the bound figure, yelling at the crowd to back away. The binding threads mummified Takagiri’s body completely, and it seemed like the catch had gone off without a hitch.
Then the bindings tightened further. For a moment, it looked like the tension was too extreme, slicing into the bound figure. I only understood what had really happened in the moments after: the body within had vanished. The cords of light fell in on themselves, collapsing to a single point as the force was no longer resisted, compressing down on itself—just like Hina’s cast-off shards when she’d dove into the bubble. I barely had enough time to realize what was about to happen and throw my arms over my face before the detonation.
But instead of a blinding, deafening, reality-sundering explosion of ripple, all I heard was a grinding pop. Confused, I lowered my hands to peek—just in time to witness Yuuka’s hand burst apart in a fountain of gore.
The backlash had gone directly through the lattice she was holding, the glyphs in her hands shattering with too-pretty sparkles of light as the woven thread overloaded. The backflow overwhelmed the structure and decohered into free ripple directly within her hand—and was then amplified by the inferno. The end of her arm was blown apart from within, disintegrating into a spray of red horror. Time felt like it crawled to give me ample time to witness the catastrophic failure, a twisted warning from the Flame.
But as the moments dragged on and torn-off chunks of flesh glided lazily through the air, I realized it didn’t just feel like slow-motion. Time had gone…wrong. Sparks of free ripple hopped between the flecks of blood and shards of bone like little lightning bolts meandering toward the stump of her arm to ground themselves. Millisecond by millisecond, her fluid gauntlet of raw Flame flickered back to life, a silvery facsimile of how her hand had looked a moment before. It blasted open as well, little shards of silver meeting gore, and then they fell together back toward her stump like asteroids falling dirtward. The gauntlet slammed shut around the ruined meat, and I saw her fingers twitch.
Distantly, I understood that what my eyes were seeing wasn’t reality—somehow, I’d tapped into the same silver possibilities she saw. That gauntlet of her Flame had likely emerged before her hand could burst, not after. Aversion, not reversion.
The period of distorted time ended abruptly and painfully. There was still a shockwave, it had just taken its sweet time to reach me, waiting politely for Yuuka to correct the timeline. The moment I saw those silver fingers begin to move again, the pressure wave struck me like a hammer, knocking the air from my lungs and slamming me to the ground. I gasped and retched, trying to suck in a breath and scramble back to my feet, but for a terrifying two or three seconds, I felt like I was drowning. When I did manage to force a gasp of air, it was labored and ragged as I summoned my spear and wobbled to my foot-and-a-half.
Yuuka had stayed standing. Her body had been rendered whole—or rather never been touched in the first place, as I was still working to comprehend—and she’d promptly stowed it, switching back to her mantle, that overwrought assemblage of dark fabrics and faux-leathers layered together like chocolate pastry dough. While I’d been on the ground, she’d moved to stand in front of me, between me and—
My stalker.
I pieced together Takagiri’s image in motion-blurred glimpses and snippets half-obscured by Yuuka’s body as she rushed toward us. I only really collated these visual snippets after the chaos:
She’d ditched the goth fashion, which was especially apparent against the superfluous complexity of Yuuka’s outfit. This time, she was dressed to kill: combat boots, lightweight and form-fitting segmented khaki body armor—magically reinforced, judging by how she shrugged off something Yuuka shot at her as she approached in a dead sprint—pouches and holsters all along her thighs and torso, and most prominently a sword, a long Japanese katana she carried one-handed.
She dashed across torn-up earth with unnatural speed and force, each footstep sending a spray of dirt behind her. It was like Hina’s movements without any of the weightlessness, bound by Newton’s third law—meaning she demolished her surroundings with the force of her steps. Definitely augmented; the terror I’d felt the first time I’d run into her was validated tenfold seeing her in motion, spiced with a little jealousy. She accelerated into a blur and slashed at Yuuka.
The precog dodged the swing with a lazy step sideways and snapped her fingers, yelling something in Japanese. A beam lanced toward Takagiri from the other side, pale pink and glittery and powerful enough to punch through a regular human. Four more followed it from the center of Alice’s staff. Takagiri twisted and went low so the shots caught her wards shallowly and deflected off rather than making solid connection. A snarl had taken over her face, and she yelled something angrily at the Radiances as she skidded on the dirt to change her trajectory. She turned toward me instead, trying to take advantage of how Yuuka had partially moved out of the way to dodge her first strike, heedless of the subsequent shots from Alice.
I tried to heft my spear without my right leg collapsing under me. I was still struggling to regain a normal rhythm of breathing, heart pounding a million times a second; adrenaline somehow kept me standing upright as I brought my spear into the ready position, scorched wooden tip between me and the charging assassin. If she slashed, I’d parry; that was all I could do. No paranatural acrobatics for me.
But Takagiri made it only two more steps before an explosion of crimson blossomed around her, hissing against her wards and distorting her silhouette like fuzzy TV static. It hardened around her, bloody sap turning to ruby, freezing her in place in the middle of her lunge, a mask of fury on her face.
“Tsukamaeta,” Yuuka crooned.
“Good work, Bloodstone.”
“Knew she’d go for him.”
I eyed the now-solid crimson block, not willing to lower my spear quite yet. “She’s not gonna—slip out this time?”
As if on cue, Takagiri’s body splintered from within and started to dissolve into smoke. I swore, but Yuuka didn’t react. As the seconds wore on and the dissolution took its course, I realized that this time her encasement in the crystal was so complete that her incorporeal form had nowhere to go; we’d trapped her. The smoke swirled and contracted in odd ways, signs that it was trying to slip out through the fourth dimension—but evidently, it couldn’t escape even along that extraplanar axis.
“Ha!” Yuuka exclaimed.
“Christ.”
“What I’d like t’know is how the hell she’s doing that. Never did it before.”
“At least now we know why we didn’t find a body,” Alice put in.
She was referencing the team’s history with the woman cartoonishly frozen inside the chunk of crystal, but I didn’t care much for that. I was thinking more about what Yuuka had said. “Doesn’t Kimura impart pieces of his Flame?”
That was among the primary functions of the cult’s leaders, to my understanding; part of the draw in becoming a member was the promise that the most faithful and committed could wield their very own sliver of divinity. I could empathize with wanting that, but personally, such a meager scrap would never have satisfied my aspirations toward the Vaetna. Not worth selling my soul.
Anyway, such an arrangement of gifted Flame would make sense for one of Hikanome’s former…assassins? Agents? I still wasn’t entirely clear on what Takagiri’s role had been during Sugawara’s reign, other than that she had apparently been an enemy of Todai. Depending on those details, and how depraved things had gotten within the cult during that period—and the top end of that scale was nausea inducing—other mechanisms for the cloud of trapped smoke in front of us were also possible.
“Could also be a really nasty product of sanguimancy, and that smoke’s her real body,” I continued, more to myself at this point than the others.
Yuuka heard me anyway. “Gross.”
“Hold on. Sapphire lost Kimura,” Opal informed us, finger to her earpiece. “She’ll find him, but we’re staying around here until we have both of them. Amethyst is inbound for overwatch. Heliotrope, Ezzen: keep an eye on our icecube. I’m going to go coordinate evac with…Hongo,” she groaned, lifting a little off the ground into the air on jets of pink fire and looking out at the mass of shivering festivalgoers waiting for the demigods to stop blocking their evacuation route.
Yuuka snickered, which made Alice frown, tail lashing more aggressively now that it could swing freely. “Okay, Yuuka, how about you be the one to—”
A sharp snap split the air. Hairline fissures raced across the block of red gemstone, radiating out from a sword buried halfway deep, stabbed cleanly in. Kimura twisted the hilt of his blade, and the container holding his ally shattered. Alice reacted fastest and sent a bolt of energy directly at him, center-mass—it failed to connect as he shattered into the teleporter trick they kept using, as swiftly as he’d arrived. Smoke-Takagiri rushed out of the cracks and dissipated as well. Yuuka swore. Alice was yelling into her earpiece—and under both of those voices, adrenaline-heightened instinct picked up on the rustling of grass behind me.
I twisted, panic igniting the Flame in my chest. We’d somehow been caught wrong-footed despite Yuuka’s foresight. Potential magical explanations for how our opponents could have suppressed the splash of silver ripple raced through my mind—precious moments wasted on theory when death was just over my shoulder.
But Takagiri’s surprise reengagement wasn’t targeting me. Her sword sank into Yuuka’s upper back and tore downward. The Bloodstone Radiance screamed, her voice distorted and skipping like glitchy autotune as she was hewn open. Takagiri raised a foot and kicked her off the end of the blade—no blood, because the mantle was not true flesh, but the dying-machinery noise of Yuuka’s screams and the awful way she twitched on the grass was proof enough that the blow had done something awful.
I struck Takagiri. It was a shitty jab of my spear, terrible form, basically just flailing; against her wards, it should have been about as effective as trying to pierce a marble with a toothpick. But my muscles blazed with a jolt of Flame-enhanced strength, and the charred tip of my spear was a blur, a lance of desperate, angry force. For just a moment, I felt like Heung, my onyx-tipped spear striking true in vicious retribution.
I wasn’t Heung, of course. The thrust was only able to shove Takagiri off balance for a moment as her wards stopped the blow. But that was long enough for Alice to tackle her.
“Tackle” is just my best after-the-fact approximation; it was more like a white-hot fireball struck Takagiri so hard she vanished from my field of view, leaving me instinctively wincing at the wave of heat and blinking away the retina-burning afterimage of Alice’s incandescent form. I suddenly understood why one of her nicknames on Wikipedia was “Lighthouse’s Beacon.” I’d felt her burn hot before, but now she was blindingly incandescent.
After a long second of processing what had just happened, my eyes followed the twenty-meter-long trench of scorched dirt. At the end was a figure—too bright to look at directly—grappling the assassin, whose wards had reduced her figure to a blurry, noisy mess in their efforts to keep Alice’s aura from roasting her alive.
Yuuka screamed again, more of a garbled groan, and I tore my eyes away from the struggle. Alice would be fine; two more Radiances were on the way, and I couldn’t help with the fighting anyway. But maybe I could help Yuuka. She lay there motionless, helpless, her strings cut. My mind raced as I knelt shakily by her, trying to call up my understanding of the mantle’s core mechanisms, to guess where and how the underlying weave had been damaged, to intuit the precise way to patch the damage and at least stabilize her. No brilliant flash of insight appeared before me.
“I’m—gonna give it my best shot,” I promised her as I laid down my spear and gathered my thread, voice shaking with the realization that I should have practiced snapweaving {MANIFEST}; with the Radiances, it qualified as basic field medicine, and I wasn’t even prepared for that. But I still had to try to help her. She was staring at me out of the corner of her human eye as she lay face-down in the dirt and groaned something. It just came out as random noises, not even human-sounding—but I knew an agonized plea for help when I heard it. I took a deep breath, steeled myself in the feeble ways I knew how, and reached out to her to perform a miracle—
I never got the chance to try.
A hand grabbed my hair and tugged hard enough to make my eyes fill with tears. I was yanked away—not horizontally, not up, not even down into the ground. Out, across an axis that should not exist. The world around me jerked and twisted and shriveled, Yuuka’s prone body and the grass and everything moving further away, becoming flatter and smaller as my feet left the ground. She groaned again, and this time, I heard the word she’d been trying to say, robotic and out of tune but comprehensible as I was pulled into the icy void outside reality.
“Ki—mu—ra.” She had tried to warn me.
Everything was the sky and the sky was the abyss. Too high, my instincts said—the direction I was being pulled wasn’t something my body understood, but vertigo arrived anyway. Nausea rushed up my gullet, made into panic by the fact that nothing was happening when my body tried to breathe in. I reached for my spear, my source of safety—it had been left next to Yuuka’s body. Stupid. I thrashed with my Flame instead, trying to burn the man dragging me through the cosmic ocean by my scalp.
A muffled thump all around me, and the grip vanished, and I saw some kind of shadow pass over the distance-flattened image of reality in front of me—then the world rushed toward me again, shifting and slanting as I was moved in four dimensions at once.
I crashed out of the water, back into what my body understood as three-space, landing in a heap. The hard arrival jarred me; I rolled onto my side on instinct, clutching the back of my head in response to the throbbing pain and retching as my body tried to cough up water that didn’t exist. I thrashed at something touching my chest and face.
“Cutie! Hey, no, it’s okay—”
Something ice-cold sparked against my chest, and thrumming energy surged outward from my core into my limbs. I coughed one last time as the sensation of water in my lungs finally disappeared. Everything hurt, inside and out, but a warm breath on my cheek got me to at least open my eyes and take in the environment around me.
Hina was kneeling over me, hand on my chest, forehead against mine. I coughed out of embarrassment rather than somatic necessity.
“Fuck. Ow.”
“Hey. Hey,” she repeated. “You’re okay.”
“Am—that was the void. The outside.” The space beyond space, the rest of the hypercube of reality beyond our little three-dimensional world.
“He tried to grab you. But I got in front of him.”
“Thanks.” I took a deep breath. Having solid ground beneath me never felt so good. “Wait—Yuuka. She’s hurt. She’s—”
“She’s okay. So are you. Shhh.”
I finally registered where we were. I hadn’t been dumped out on the grass; Hina had dragged me into her pocketspace, her little enclosed lounge floating in the void. Safe, warm, dry, dimly lit.
“Can—can they get in here?”
“No.”
I let myself believe her.
A groan came from behind me. I twisted, whimpering at the aches the movement generated, and saw Yuuka curled up under a blanket on the far side of the room, glaring at us through one good eye. Her crystalline eye was fully hidden under fresh layers of gauze wrapped around her head. Had the wound to her mantle harmed her real body, too?
“You’re—okay?”
“Didn’t even see him. Shouldn’t be fucking possible.”
Not really an answer to my question, but if she was feeling good enough to spit invectives, I figured that boded well.
“Not your fault,” Hina soothed, which made Yuuka’s lips curl.
“Your—your mantle,” I whispered. Yuuka frowned impressively.
“It is. Bitch got me. Emergency disengage got stuck.” Her good eye flickered from me to Hina, then back to me. “You tried.”
“I…don’t think I’d have been able,” I admitted. I’d been at a loss, overwhelmed by the task of saving a life with magic. “Should’ve—been more prepared. Should’ve known what to do.”
That got a humorless, angry chortle from her. “That’s two of us.”
Hina gently pushed me back down onto the spread of blankets and ran her fingers through my hair.
“You did fine, cutie. Nice stab.”
Oh. I’d done that, hadn’t I? Supercharged my body with magic again. I reflexively opened my mouth to justify the use of blood magic—then realized I didn’t need to, not with Hina. I settled a bit further down into the nest of blankets and allowed her hand in my hair to soothe the adrenaline-tinted chaos of what had just happened.
“It’s so pretty.”
I looked up at her, some dry amusement managing to unburrow from the fresh load of trauma it had been buried under. “That’s where your head’s at?”
“I’m not leaving you alone again,” she murmured.
I frowned. My body was starting to recognize I was safe here with her, and a sudden surge of exhaustion washed over me, amplified by the warmth of the room after the cold of the park and then the frigid abyss. I wanted to just leave the rest of this to the Radiances. But that moment of power when I’d struck Takagiri lingered in my mind. I had made a difference. I wanted to do so again.
“They’re fighting out there, yeah? We have to help.”
“I shoulda just put you in here to begin with but I didn’t and you got hurt and it’s just better if you stay out of the way until we finish this,” Hina rambled. Apparently, everybody was ignoring my questions right now. “I really just thought I’d get him on the way in and this wouldn’t turn into…yeah. He’s way slipperier than he should be.”
Silence fell for a few seconds until I groaned, blinking and rubbing my scalp. It had felt like Kimura was trying to tear my hair out. Couldn’t he have grabbed me anywhere else? Hina’s blue eyes followed my hand.
“They both are,” Yuuka muttered eventually, sounding angry. “Her getting out of the bindings, sure, but the shit with Kimura?”
“You did the shibari thing?” Hina asked.
“…Ugh. But…yeah, and she just—poof. Musta been an actual blink, not a hop. I got her the second time with a full encasement, but then the old guy showed up and just…” she trailed off into a frustrated growl.
“They’re as mobile as you are,” I told Hina. “But…that shouldn’t be possible, not really. Him, sure, but her? She shouldn’t be able to blink like that, not as a human. We were thinking it might have been some really nasty blood magic.”
Hina shook her head. “Nope. I’d be able to tell. She’s augmented, but it’s just gear, not like me or something messier. But you know what’s weird?”
I waited for her to continue the thought, but she didn’t, just stared expectantly at me with those big, blue eyes. I sighed. “…What’s weird?”
“She smells exactly like him.”
I nodded; that explained some of it. “So he did impart some of his Flame to her. Which means there’s a link we can sever to cut off her abilities,” I deduced, proud of the admittedly basic strategy. “And maybe stop them from blinking around like that. If nothing else, it’d at least turn the fight from a…two versus three to one versus three. I think. If you’re staying here with me.”
“There’s no third,” Hina clarified. “Yuuka’s out of it too.”
“Why? Even without her mantle, her eye is—practically unfair. Shouldn’t—”
“It’s fucked too,” Yuuka interjected. I frowned and waited for a clarification, but none came; the fresh bandages on her head spoke for themselves. I thought for a minute, then found the moment in the chaos that was bugging me.
“Maybe…that’s not a problem. Your arm. I saw you—avert it?”
Yuuka stared at me. “What the fuck?”
“I did, I swear. Silver.”
“What? No. Fuck off,” she spat, and rolled onto her side, evidently unwilling to entertain what I was saying.
“Huh?” Hina leaned in toward me, curious. “You saw her stuff?”
I winced. “Don’t…say it like that. I got some…bleed-over from her precognition? I don’t know what to call it, but I did see it. Hold on—you’re not going to help?”
“I want to finish what I started,” she muttered, avoiding my eyes as a bit of a growl entered her voice. “But I’m not leaving you. You could get hurt. They’re not allowed to do that.”
“Do—can Amane and Alice actually beat them, two-on-two?”
“Yeah,” said both of the girls, but Hina was still not meeting my eyes, and Yuuka’s heart didn’t sound in it.
“While assisting with the evacuation? What happens if Alice gets hurt and the tunnel collapses. Or—” my stomach lurched. “Yuuka, the tunnel is based on your LM. Which Takagiri fucked up pretty bad. Is it even still open?”
“…I don’t know.”
“It is,” Hina confirmed. “Humans are on their way out.”
“That’s a relief. But even so—Alice’s magic is what’s holding it open, and she turned into a fireball after Yuuka got hit. I—she’s going to trigger her dragon-ka, if she hasn’t already.”
Both of the Radiances reacted in subtle ways. Hina whimpered; Yuuka inhaled. The room was so unnaturally silent that I caught both; I wouldn’t have normally. My heart sank; if they agreed with me, then the risk was very real. But that made what I was saying all the more important. I pressed on.
“And…Takagiri and Kimura. They’ve both been way exceeding your expectations, yeah? From what I’m understanding. Capabilities we didn’t expect. They got past your sight, Yuuka.”
“Fuck you. Amane can handle it,” Yuuka insisted, something dangerous in her voice.
I winced. “…Not made of glass. I know. But—neither are we. We should help. We have to help.”
That set her off.
“You’re trying to be the hero?” She snapped. “Trying to be the Vaetna, solving our problems for us? If those cunts are too much for us, they’re way too much for you. You’re not a Vaetna. You’re not even one of us. The only reason you’re still alive is because they want you alive, for whatever reason, not because you can keep up.”
“I hit her! I’m not made of glass either.”
“Only because she went for me. You weren’t fast enough for her. If you go back out there, you’re a liability—”
I bristled. “Don’t fucking call—”
“—and so am I.”
Author’s Note:
The action continues! Everybody’s being so cool! Yuuka is overpowered…when her eye works. Right now she’s just sad.
Extra big thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter! We went through a ton of edits to reach what you’re looking at, and at time of writing several of them (and I) consider it one of the best chapters. That being said, it did take two weeks to write. Worth it, I’d say.
Anyway.
Two thousand readers; that’s about as many people as fit on a Tokyo subway train during rush hour! Thank you for reading! I’m really looking forward to finishing off this arc and what comes next.
If you’re a public reader who’s reading this right after 2.13, I’m afraid it’s going to be two weeks until 2.15’s public release, since this chapter will still release publicly next week. But it’ll only be one week until 2.15 releases on Patreon! Food for thought…
If you’re reading this after the fact, well, onward to the next chapters with you! Thank you, too, for being a part of Sunspot.
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