CONTENT WARNINGS

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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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March 16, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

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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March 7, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

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!

February 24, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

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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February 16, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

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…

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February 7, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Have you ever seen one of those ultra-slow-motion videos of a bullet passing through ballistic gel? The projectile leaves a series of overlapping voids expanding behind it, the nominally solid gel encouraged by the extreme forces to bubble like a liquid. Milliseconds later, the forces that formed those bubbles have dissipated through the gel, so the cavity no longer has anything to hold it open and begins to collapse back in on itself. But the bullet drags outside air in behind it, and as the bubble collapses, that air is crushed and compressed, pressurized so rapidly that it ignites into a little explosion, a flare of light and heat that momentarily grants a second life to each bubble, glowing like fireworks before finally being snuffed for good.

The same thing happened when Hina struck the white-ripple field surrounding Yoyogi Park. The blazing blue comet pierced the field, and light exploded across the sky, a sapphire aurora both spilling outward beyond the barrier and following her in like leaking ink. Even though her mantle was barely visible as more than a pinpoint, I could see it was flaking apart, shards of LM trailing off of her and decohering into more ripple like the tail of a comet.

For a moment, there was equilibrium, the insane force of her arrival balanced against the field’s self-correcting shape. Then, like the ballistic gel, the field buckled and fell inward where she struck it, closing behind her and isolating pockets of the blue, compressing them inward, squeezing and concentrating the bubbles of ripple until they were a trail of blinding pinpoints suspended behind Hina’s dive.

Watching this collapse over a fraction of a second, I remember thinking how strange it was that there was no physical shockwave, no wind. As if responding to me, the colored guide-braziers flickered, and then their flames were being sucked inward too, an incandescent rainbow caught aswirl in the implosion of the ripple compressing Hina’s constellation of the Frozen Flame. The compression reached a peak, and like that hyper-pressurized air, the pinpoints detonated, tearing open Miyoko’s field. It curdled and peeled back, whips of white and yellow sparks dancing and igniting at the seam before they were overtaken by the tide of sapphire light. For a brief and blinding moment, Hina outshone the sun and dyed the whole world blue.

The sound reached my ears moments later, and everybody, flamebearers included, flinched and ducked for cover at the deafening, roaring rumble that was felt as much as heard, rattling my entire body, terrifying in a primal sense like a peal of thunder or erupting volcano; something early man would have worshiped out of fear. I remember that feeling more clearly than any other part, how my legs trembled and I hunched on pure instinct, how everybody was screaming, including me.

That was all before the ripple reached us.

I cried out as the lattice of my prosthetic flickered, red ripple hijacking my nerves and sending lancing pain from foot to brain stem while my stabilizer unit in my jacket pocket tried and failed to compensate. I fell to one knee, then on my arse, gasping and gritting my teeth as the pain overwhelmed my other senses. The device in my pocket was turning hot—an acrid smell hit my nose, and I tried to squirm out of the jacket even while phantom cramps made it feel like my foot was about to fold itself in half. Somebody helped pull the jacket off of me, and I immediately curled up on the pillow I’d been sitting on, cowering under the collapsing sky and trying not to scream at the venom in my nerves.

Over long, agonizing seconds, the pain ebbed downward from its peak. Gasping, ragged breaths became shallower and more even—and colder, as nature reasserted itself. The temperature was plummeting; with the barrier between hot and cold air destroyed, the former drove upward, and the cold air surrounding the park rushed inward, frigid, howling wind kicking up grit and shearing at my sensitive skin through the gossamer protection of my shirt. Familiar aches invaded my fingers, and soon I found myself curled up not in a futile attempt to escape pain but as a way of preserving precious body heat as winter announced its return.

I gritted my teeth; my fragile meat-body wanted to stay where it was and huddle for warmth, but I couldn’t afford to. Even without looking, I knew that this was an apocalyptically dangerous situation for the hundreds of thousands of average humans in the park. There was commotion around me, voices and shuffling, and I could hear yelling and screaming and sirens in the distance. The real flamebearers, the Radiances and Hikanome’s damn cultists, were probably already mobile and trying to help people, not fetal and blubbering. I had to get up and join them—it was pathetic to have been knocked flat on my ass.

“C’mon,” I murmured to myself, somewhere between a whisper and subvocalization. “The Spire stands, so can you.” I sucked in a deep breath. “Up we go. One, two—”

I sat up and cracked my eyes open.

Everything was dyed yellow. In that second or two of the detonation, the wash of blue light had indoctrinated my eyes to its overwhelming hue, so the natural sunlight seemed all wrong—all the colors were out of balance. The sky, actually a thin blue, appeared to be sickly orange. The remnants of brightest blue ink in the sky looked paler by the moment, thinning and dissipating into the aether. Distantly, I was relieved; that was a good sign as far as inferno intensity was concerned—no self-sustaining engine of magical tides, nor a wound in the world. Tokyo’s sky would not gain a second scar like the one over its harbor.

But the park still looked like it had been hit by a hurricane. It was an absurd relief to my social anxiety that I was not the only one who’d been cowering on the ground, bowled over by the sheer scale of forces—the entire park had. The spindly trees had remained standing, but I could see the big tents laying half-collapsed, smaller ones uprooted and tossed around. The tall braziers of colored flame that were supposed to mark districts of the festival stood dead and askew.

As for my immediate surroundings, I was surrounded by commotion. A cluster of people stood and knelt on the other side of the table from me, where Miyoko had been sitting. I spotted her at the center of the press of people, lying propped up on a hastily constructed stack of the pillows we’d been sitting on. The high priestess must have been the one maintaining the field, and thus took the full backlash of Hina’s arrival. But she wasn’t my highest priority anyway. I turned, rubbing my hands together rapidly to stave off the chill. I’d only been in the false warmth for an hour, tops—was the natural temperature supposed to feel this cold?

“Amane?”

A distorted, warbling ring came from behind me by way of reply. The Amethyst Radiance had mantled, standing tall, a purple statue unscathed by the devastation surrounding her. Once I made eye contact with her—or close enough—she acknowledged me with a nod, then her spike-snout swung back toward the chaos in the festival’s main section. Todai’s people stood clustered around her legs, barely coming up to her waist, like children against her stature. Heliotrope sat unmantled on her shoulder, leaning against her head. She was on the phone with her left hand while she dabbed something off her face with a napkin scrounged from the table—blood, I realized, trickling from under her bangs. I winced.

“You alright?”

She lowered the phone momentarily to curse at me. That was probably fair; I didn’t have better words for the destruction my girlfriend had wrought. Had her first rescue of me also been so explosive, when she’d saved me from the Peacies and that buried car? Or did the apocalyptic suddenness of her arrival mean she thought I was in even more danger now? It certainly displayed a stunning disregard for collateral damage; even if nobody had died in that initial flashbang of contact, the ripple churning overhead would have already begun to seep into people’s flesh. I needed to help contain it, or evacuate civilians, or both. What about Kimura?

I started to get to my feet and start making myself useful, but didn’t get all the way up before my ankle wobbled beneath me and I remembered that my stabilizer had been rendered useless. I reached for my cast-off suit jacket—it was warm, which I tried to savor while gingerly feeling toward the pocket. The stabilizer unit itself was cooked, too hot to touch; the component meant to convert interfering ripple to harmless heat had been overfed by the extreme conditions and amplified by the white surrounding it. The cocktail of ripple had gone to town on the disc, partially crushing it into more of a V-shape. It was fucked. I carefully shook the useless puck of ruined magitech out of the pocket, and it crumbled when it hit the plastic tarp; {ASH} residue. Don’t breathe that stuff.

I shrugged my jacket back on, grateful that at least the device’s failure had left me with a warm outer layer. Then I tried to kneel again, putting my bad foot under me to see if the prosthetic itself had also been fried. It seemed like the stabilizer had taken the brunt of it—so no walking for me, but at least the basic analgomantics in the prosthetic were working. I sat back down, trying to stay huddled up for warmth. There wasn’t much point in standing; it wasn’t like I’d be much use in the pursuit even if I was fully mobile—

A sound like tearing metal erupted next to me. Adrenaline surged. I flinched away, scrambling backward from—

“Cutie! Hi! Love the hair!”

Hina looked untouched by her meteoric arrival—but she wasn’t in her mantle. I suspected it had been sacrificed as ablative shielding.

“Hina? Christ, are you okay? What the fuck was that? A fucking inferno—”

She flowed forward, standing over me and bending over at the waist with feline flexibility, putting her hands on my shoulders and nuzzling the top of my head.

“Shh. Can’t stick around; I gotta get him. Listen—he’s not working alone.”

I automatically reached up and put my hands over hers. Most of me was still shaken and terrified by the forces she’d just unleashed, but her touch was soothing in a small way.

“Kimura? I don’t—he’s working with the stalker, right?”

“Yeah. Haven’t found her, but it was his Flame. But—there’s others. Here.”

“Hina, clarify, please. Other stalkers? Other flamebearers?”

By now, the others were taking notice of her presence. The Hikanome and Todai entourages had turned toward us. Yuuka was disembarking from Amane’s shoulder, and Hongo stepped to the front of the crowd surrounding Miyoko. Hina straightened and raised her voice, addressing us all, but didn’t abandon her protective position over me.

“Other Sugawara loyalists,” she growled.

A cacophony of confused, overlapping Japanese exploded from both groups. I could hear Amane’s wind-chime voice over the group, but she wasn’t the one who reestablished order. That was Hongo, speaking in a resonant voice amplified and tinged by magic. He barked something out that made everybody quiet down, then pointed at Hina.

“Fox. That’s a severe accusation.”

“Don’t trust my nose, Nacchan?”

“Miyoko did,” Yuuka cut in, typing one-handed on her phone. “Called him a traitor right before he vanished. You got a trail?”

Hina nodded, idly running her fingers through my long hair. She spoke in a rush. “He’s shifting and hopping all over, but still in the park for now, ‘cause crossing the seams after what I just did to Shiny’s bubble would be suicide. I’m gonna find him, you guys find the other: Takagiri Izumi. Ring a bell?”

Hongo’s eyes narrowed, and murmurs erupted from his people behind him. Yuuka pulled the blood-stained napkin away from her head and inspected it, not quite able to snarl through her wince.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Hina agreed. “So that’s why I’m in a bit of a rush.”

Yuuka shook her head slowly and deliberately, in spite of her injury, and gestured around. “Yeah, she’s a loose end, bad fuckin’ news. And we’ll get her this time. We will. But—look around, Hina. Innocents first. Clean up your fuckin’ mess.”

“C’mon, Yuuka, I thought you’d be totally—”

Hongo shook out his robe. “Ghost or not, the flock is terrified and in danger because of what you just did, fox. I would not call it very mahou shoujo to put civilians in the crossfire like this, and you’re interfering with our internal affairs in doing so.”

“Bite me, Nacchan. Didn’t you hear the name? She’s after cutie—and working with Kimura to make it happen. They were probably working together back then, too.” She looked down at me, determination shining in the blue of her eyes. “She’s the stalker, I think.”

Yuuka frowned. “The what?”

My blood ran cold. “You—”

A new voice interrupted, crackling through distorted cell signal from Yuuka’s phone. “Hina, I take it we can’t convince you to clean up your mess instead?”

A relieved smile broke across Hongo’s face. He gave Alice’s speakerphone voice a courtier’s bow, deep and flourished with hand gestures. Many of Hikanome’s people bowed as well.

“Lady Dragon, it is—”

“You, shut up,” came the curt reply. “Hina?”

“Sorry, babe. I gotta.”

“Figures,” Alice sighed, staticy. “Then I’m authorizing you to give them hell and keep them off the rest of us while we stabilize this situation. Don’t kill them, though; I’ve got a lot of questions.”

“You got it.”

“As for you, Hongo-san: Leave discipline to us.”

He bowed to the phone again. “I would not dream of it, Lady Dragon, my apologies. As I was saying, it’s a relief to hear your voice in this time of crisis. Will you be gracing us with your presence in person?”

“The inferno’s cut the park off from the rest of the city. I’m going to see if we can open up a stable passage for emergency services.”

My skin crawled for a different reason than what Hina had just told me. I whispered up at her. “We’re trapped?”

Hina shrugged. “So’re they.” She knelt to nuzzle my face. “I’ll get them both. Promise.”

Another staticy sigh came through the speakerphone. “—Human life comes first. Yuuka, Amane—help Hikanome tend to their people, stabilize this—this clusterfuck. Once we find an entry point, I’m going to need your help to punch through, but that’ll be a few hours.”

I tried to push aside the revelation of my stalker—Takagiri, apparently—and focused on what Alice was saying about our situation. The top priority of responsible flamebearers during inferno response and cleanup was to shield the humans, but “a few hours” would mean enough ripple exposure that we’d have dead or dying civilians by the time the evac route was open. Even with five active flamebearers, we’d be hard pressed to shield everybody completely; the park was huge, and therefore so was the inferno. That was far more important than a few people being after me personally, especially if Hina was dealing with them anyway.

“Hina can’t chase two people at once,” Yuuka pointed out. “She’ll have her hands full with Kimura if that shatter move is as slippery as I think it is. What about Takagiri? Bitch disappeared completely after last time, and my eye’s munted right now on top of that. I can’t fuckin’ track her.” She sounded angry.

“She’s not a flamebearer. If she is after Ezzen, we don’t need to know where she is as long as one of us is with him. And once we have a tunnel open, they’ll have to go through us. Hina, you started this, I need you to at least tell me where the rift’s weakest so we can anchor the—”

“Mou kiechatta,” Yuuka groaned.

My girlfriend had vanished when Alice had begun to give orders, leaving no trace but the ghost of a kiss on my forehead. Was catching my stalker more important to her than human lives?

“Fine. That can keep—is Ezzen there?”

“Yeah,” I called out.

“Give him the phone,” she instructed Yuuka. The Heliotrope Radiance reluctantly passed it over, turning off the speaker as she did. I raised the phone to my ear, huddling under my thin jacket.

“Ezzen,” Alice sighed. “What kind of mess have you gotten into?”

“Uh, ripple shockwave toasted my stabilizer, so I’m not exactly mobile.”

“That’s—fine, you’re staying right there anyway. But, er, that’s not really what I meant; Hina only gave me very piecemeal information, and she said you’d fill in the rest. So please explain to me: what the hell is ‘the stalker?’”

I swallowed.

“I—um—I don’t really know? It’s…a person I saw.” My voice was shaking.

“A person you saw,” Alice repeated, deadpan.

“Yeah.”

“And why’s this person got Hina disappearing for days on end, and when she finally does reappear, it’s to tell me one of Sugawara’s old ghosts is back and then immediately cause an inferno in the middle of the city?”

“Because—she thought it was Hikanome related. Guess—she was right?”

“Ezzen, you sound terrified. I’m not going to yell at you for her mess, I promise! Just walk me through it from the start. When did this happen?”

“Um. Sorry. When you took me to the paperwork place, once you left.”

“Wait, last week? Why didn’t you say—agh, Hina told you not to, didn’t she?”

I tried to affirm, admit that this was all because of a stupid omission that had gotten out of hand, but my voice didn’t work; I was too afraid. It came out as more of a choking rasp.

“Ezzen? Oh, that’s it, wasn’t it? You were—”

“I was scared,” I blubbered. “And she didn’t want you to worry! We were going to go shopping and if we told you then you would have told us to come right home and that made her really upset and she promised I’d be safe. And then after, when we did go back because of all the Thunder Horse stuff, that took priority, and then it was all a mess and she told me not to worry and she’d look into it on her own! I—I knew that was a bad idea at the time, but she really thought you shouldn’t worry about it on top of all the other ways I’ve been causing problems for you and—sorry. Sorry.”

I was making a scene with my confession, but I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to shut out the people around me.

“That’s—okay, shh, it’s okay,” she soothed. I felt even worse that she needed to calm me down because of this, not the magical disaster I was standing at the epicenter of. “Tell me what actually happened.”

“I was—I was at a crosswalk and I saw a…a girl. At first, I thought it was Hina, but it wasn’t, and something about her seemed dangerous, and she was surprised I saw her, and then she vanished right before Hina arrived. Like—like a breaking illusion, like the {MANIFEST}-{TRANSMIT} thing we did when—for Amethyst’s mantle, that’s where I got the idea. It’s—”

“Breathe, Ezzen. I understand, thank you. Deep breaths.”

I did as I was told, trying to steady my nerves. It felt good to get it off my chest, but some guilt still remained.

“…Sorry. Hina’s a…bad influence.”

“Trying to win points back with me? I’m not upset, really. Not at you, at any rate. Just remember that opsec applies to external leakage, not internal. The team should tell each other stuff, yeah?”

“Yeah…Is she fired?”

“Hina? No. There’ll have to be…consequences, but if we can pin this to Kimura, it’ll all work out, I think. Know anything about that?”

“No. Should I?” I winced and was grateful Alice couldn’t see it. “Hina’s—got me pretty much entirely in the dark about this. Did it all herself.”

“So you don’t know why she accused one of Hikanome’s top flamebearers of working with the person he carried out a coup against?”

“No.” When she put it like that, I felt very much in over my head and out of my element. “I don’t know anything about the politics or history here. Um…Kimura disappeared in the same way as the stalker. And you said Katagiri’s—”

“Takagiri. Ta-ka.”

“—T—Takagiri’s not a flamebearer, which means it would make sense if he’s the one providing the magic, so…hold on.” A dark thought had sprang up in that brief moment of interruption, one I was afraid to voice. “Did…did Hina plan this? Did she not tell me or you so that I could be bait today? Because they’re trapped now, right? Is that something she’d do?”

“No,” Alice countered immediately. “I…resent that you feel the need for that much suspicion, especially of Hina. She loves you too much to play it like that. This was just…bad timing, I expect. For all the…mess that this is, I can tell you with certainty that she wouldn’t have put you in the crossfire if she could have avoided it.”

“And everyone else?” I was getting more upset. “There are thousands and thousands of people here! I’m not worth that much more than them.”

“…She’s…listen, Ezzen, she’s more selective about how she values human life than I’d like, but we don’t have time to debate the morality of it—just know that I’m not happy about it either.”

“Fine, okay. Can I help?”

“Yes, with information first. When it comes to Sugawara…we thought the book was closed on that. He’s supposed to be in a medically induced coma in a prison in Yokohama, and everybody loyal to him should also be in prison or dead. Takagiri just…vanished. If she’s back, and Kimura is back under his thumb…” She took a deep breath. “Was Kimura being…suspicious? Anything that could back up Hina’s hearsay?”

“They’re all suspicious,” I muttered quietly enough that Hongo wouldn’t be able to hear. “Their ‘welcoming ceremony’ was suspicious as hell—they isolated me into a reality bubble thing—but…I don’t know. He wasn’t setting off any more alarm bells than the others were.”

“Isolated you?” There was alarm in her voice.

“Um—pulled me into a pocket dimension, alone. They babbled about my Flame and offered to do a whole medium ritual with Dad’s ghost. I couldn’t really tell if it was grift or if they genuinely believe in their own magic.”

“Later, Ezzen. God knows we have enough to bolt down already—wait, his ghost?”

“I said no. It was just bullshit, right?”

“…Right, yes. You said your stabilizer was ruined?”

“Yeah.”

“And you’re not thinking of resolving that with more blood magic to help Hina chase down Kimura, I hope?”

“No!” Christ, was that my reputation? Jumping at every opportunity to use blood magic to get myself into more trouble? “I—do you think Hina needs the help?”

“I…hope not,” she hedged. I didn’t like the uncertainty; in my mind, Hina’s physical capabilities were superior to all but the Vaetna. Alice explained. “Kimura was never a fighter, but Takagiri is dangerous, an unknown quantity, especially if they link up. Just—trust Hina has it under control, and we’ll keep another Radiance right by your side until we have you out of there. I don’t want to hear later that you were limping around covered in gore, sticking your spear where it doesn’t belong. Got it?”

“I wasn’t going to! But…I want to help with inferno control if I can.”

“Do you have inferno response training I don’t know about?”

“I don’t mean medical or crowd control. But—the park’s cut off by tidal shove, right? I can find the thinnest seam for you to punch through.”

Alice said something away from the phone, then picked it back up. “We don’t have readings yet, the crews are still setting up. Without Hina’s nose or Yuuka’s eye, Ai’s saying it’ll take hours and a whole server bank to chew through the data.”

I thought about this. This wasn’t a problem the Vaetna had to deal with; a vaet could literally cut through the storm. But we lesser flamebearers had to make do.

“Put Ai on, please.”

There was a rough, crackling noise as the phone changed hands. “Moshi moshi. Alice woke me up. Did you do something to your hair?”

“Later.” I was surprised at the grin that spread across my face at her voice. Finally, we were collaborating on something that mattered—saving people, not murder. “How many detection nodes are they setting up around the perimeter?”

It was good to hear her voice, but I was suddenly feeling the hurry; statistically, every minute we spent not evacuating civilians was taking weeks off the lifespans of at least a few of them, and I could potentially speed up the process of setting up a safe evacuation route by hours. I lowered the phone briefly and waved toward the group of Todai people, gesturing that I needed a pencil and paper.

“Sixty? Sixty-two. We’re pooling with Hikanome and the kanrikyoku—the Bureau.”

I had my phone in my lap and had pulled up the map of the park I had downloaded. I was facing east, and we were on the west side of the park, which meant—I glanced up at the sky, where the blue stain still remained in traces. The natural sky was otherwise visible overhead, but as I looked further down toward the horizon, the ripple at the borders of the park was combining in tides strong enough to distort the passage of light, let alone matter. I turned the map; Hina had come in from the northeast, so the backsplash and collapse of her cavitation trail would be concentrated on the west side of the park. That was making some assumptions about how Miyoko had set up her field—and how it even worked—but as far as I could tell, she still wasn’t conscious to ask about it.

“Any of them full-spectrum, 4-way flow?”

“Yes, ours. That’s only twelve. We don’t have many; usually Hina and Yuuka can do most of this without technology.”

“Well—” I glanced over at Yuuka, who was on her feet and talking to Amane, but still holding gauze over her magical eye. “That’s fine, I only need…eight of those on the southwest side bordering the VIP area, and three at points that superscribe a triangle around the park. Uh—” Clipboard came with my materials and helped me clear a spot on the table, and I scribbled out a rough blob of the park’s shape. “Thanks. Uh, Ai, I’m sending a picture of the layout on my phone.”

“Hai. I can picture it, I think—ah, there’s your photo. Alice—sou, acchi—” There was off-mic discussion for a moment. “She’s going to fly out the far ones. What are you planning, Ezzen?”

I had moved on to scribbling glyph notation onto the paper—where had Clipboard managed to procure graph paper in a situation like this? I drew lines, scribbled tension and offset and other notes, connecting shapes together. I didn’t need GWalk to know this would work.

“Gimme a few minutes. It’ll make more sense when I send the diagram.”

—

The chain of glyphs I drew was a bespoke data processing algorithm specifically adapted for the position and type of inputs the ripple sensors would give it. Generally, doing that kind of processing via glyphcraft wasn’t faster or easier than with a mundane computer, but this specific situation, simulating and guessing the behavior of ripple in a bounded space, was an exception.

I was banking on the fact that the field’s border nearest us, closest to Miyoko, would have formed one epicenter of the distortion effect; the other was obviously the stain in the sky, which marked the cluster of implosion points where Hina had first contacted the field. By using the ripple readings around those areas and the overall gradient of ripple tides picked up by the larger triangle of sensors that enclosed the whole park, it was possible to perform some clever reductions and triangulate the point where the effect separating inside from outside was weakest.

I lacked the skill to actually implement the glyph diagram with Flame—but that was the same as it had always been. Theory was my strong suit, not execution, and there was no reason for me to try to force it to work with blood magic. I had Ai implement the lattice instead, and once she understood what she was looking at, she found ways to streamline the process further, get even more computing power out of a relatively short chain of pink-oriented glyphs.

Eight minutes after I sent the diagram, we had the location of the best point of access around the perimeter of the park. It was closer to the south side than I’d have guessed, near where the map said there was a group of large theater tents. Amane and Hongo were occupied corralling and pacifying the bulk of the crowd in the northern section of the park, snuffing the worst areas of ripple, and coordinating what limited first aid we had; that left me and Yuuka to link with Alice from our side of the barrier.

It was determined that I was probably safest with Yuuka, even with her eye crippled. Alice didn’t want me around Hikanome’s people, in case there were more Sugawara loyalists, and I very much shared the feeling; plus, once we did get the tunnel open, I could get out immediately, and then we could completely deny Kimura and Takagiri access to me with them still inside the inferno. Clipboard helped me limp to one of the cars, and we set off toward the chosen site, with a scout car screening the off-road route before us.

“Today was supposed to be fun,” Yuuka groused from the seat in front of me. Clipboard and I were where we’d been on the way in, which put me diagonally behind Yuuka, unable to see most of her face past her bangs. Periodically, though, a trickle of blood would appear below the curtain of black hair, and she’d hurriedly wipe it away. “Stupid fuckin’ animal, had to turn it into a fight.”

We’d actually seen Hina again, very briefly. She’d blinked into existence in front of the car, ragdolled off the road, struck a tree so hard its trunk swayed with a crack, then vanished again as she rose to her feet. Evidently, she was fighting one of the two somewhere in the fourth-dimensional spaces outside reality—maybe even explicitly trying to cover me. I tried not to think about the possibility of an ambush as I looked out the window, toward the devastation caused by her explosive entrance.

The car wound its way around destroyed tents and signs of abandoned festivities. Some had been conventionally crushed by the hurricane-force winds caused by the pressure differential, but others were damaged in more esoteric ways, melted or overgrown or fractured as though reflected in a smashed mirror—signs of how lingering ripple had fragmented and distorted reality in those places. Some of them would return to normality as the larger inferno died down, but others would need to be stitched back together with magic to repair the local fabric of reality. For now, all that could be done was avoid them.

There were people, too. The tide of civilians—I tried not to think of them as the ‘survivors’, too morbid—flowed toward the park’s center and away from the most violently affected edges. Hongo and Amane’s efforts to herd them toward the safest regions of the park seemed to be mostly successful, but maybe every one in three were visibly sick or injured. Burns abounded, and a number of them seemed partially blinded by the immense flash of Hina’s impact, led by their fellows toward safety. Many of them were shivering, too sparsely dressed for the cold, and were using picnic blankets and stage costumes as makeshift outerwear to make up the difference.

While I’d been working on the glyphs, Hongo had reassured me that the human suffering on display wasn’t as bad as it looked; one of Hikanome’s premier miracles was curing ripple sickness, so most of “the flock” would make a full recovery from the magical effects. But even if I were to disregard my doubts about the veracity of said miracles, people’s symptoms would only increase in severity the longer they were trapped in here, so time was of the essence. The sooner we could get a tunnel established, the sooner we could evacuate the area of effect and get people proper medical care. That took precedent over my own desire to be away from the renewed threat of my stalker.

I’d have felt better if Yuuka’s eye was working. But the more I thought about it, wasn’t it weird that she’d been caught off guard even before Hina had caused the inferno? Shouldn’t she of all people have been prepared, have seen the whole incident coming through silver ghosts of the insane quantities of red and blue Hina would create? Curiosity nipped at me. The extent to which she had been caught off guard felt like it contradicted her foresight.

Prodding at her ego about it seemed like a bad idea, though.

“Is your eye okay?” I hazarded.

“Will be.”

“Will it…heal normally?”

“Normally? Sure, and pretty quick. But in the middle of an inferno zone? Might heal fine in here and then be munted when we get out.”

“Because of the white ripple,” I explained to nobody. “How does…looking through it work?”

She twisted in her seat to glare at me with her normal eye. “What’s with the questions?”

“Uh. I’ve been seeing a lot of magic I don’t understand lately. Like, I’m still trying to wrap my head around what the cult’s people claim to be able to do. So I’m trying to have an open mind, because understanding is better than not understanding.” I fumbled, unable to leave the statement there. “And if I can understand your eye better, I might be able to fix it now.”

“Ah, yeah, glyph genius, gonna solve all our problems for us. Because we’re not smart enough to do it ourselves.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“It is.”

“Is this about me being a guy, again? I’m not—I don’t mean to ‘mansplain’ your own tech to you, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”

Yuuka frowned. “Are you making fun of me?”

“No! I’m very confused right now!”

“Ugh. No, that’s not what I was insinuating. I’ve been told I don’t have to worry about that with you, anyway.”

Amane or Ai must have vouched for my character; I should thank them later. “Then what’s your problem with me? I mean—other than everything with Hina. I want to learn so I can help you; why’s that a bad thing?”

“She is the problem.”

“Alright, fine, fuck off, I guess,” I riposted, not quite able to disagree. “Just trying not to be dead weight.”

“Don’t start with the self-deprecating shit. ‘S not what I meant, and you’re not dead weight. At least you want to help, better than…” she gestured out the window, at the destroyed tents and refugees. “Her. That.”

“…Yeah. Not a very proportional response, is it? I mean, she’s here to protect me, and even I think this is overkill.”

“All this for your fuckin’…what did you call it? Stalker?”

“Takagiri, apparently. It was a…thing.” It was sort of a relief to at least have a name to the face, and an approximate location—even if I now knew that it was more than a one-off encounter. “But it doesn’t warrant this.”

“Wow, we agree on something.” She looked out the window, dabbing blood off her face again. “Yeah. She’s too focused on keeping them off of you when she coulda just…told us ‘n trusted us to do it. If it’s a problem for the whole team, we should handle it as a team.”

“Did she…I don’t know, expect you to see it coming?”

She must have seen something before or during the impact; the persistent blood on her cheek suggested she’d been affected intensely enough to overload the magitech organ, which made sense given the amplifying effect of the white ripple that surrounded us.

“Maybe. Don’t know if she was thinking that far ahead.”

“Alice said something similar.”

“Yeah. And—” she grunted with pained frustration, grabbing another piece of gauze. “Fuck. Like I said yesterday, eye was already on the fritz all week, but this is so big that I shouldn’t have been able to miss it. This is my fuckup too.”

—

We made it to the edge of the park a few minutes later. The inferno’s border wasn’t a solid wall separating us from the outside world; it was more like looking down into a body of water, gradually becoming denser and murkier the deeper you looked. There were flickers of motion within, a chaotic churn of magic that would corrupt and destroy any matter that dared enter it. Even going near it was a bad idea for unaugmented humans, so Clipboard and our driver were hanging back a healthy distance; Yuuka and I were afforded some protection by our Flames, which I could feel as a tingling across my body. Or maybe that was just the cold—either way, it was frightening to consider that the storm in front of us was the mildest point on the whole perimeter, according to the math.

We did have a few other human spectators: A crowd of Hikanome’s most die-hard believers, intent on seeing some of their divine lightbearers deliver them unto salvation. Many of them were praying. They at least had enough sense to not get in our way, but I wasn’t sure what they were so excited to see; Yuuka and I didn’t cut particularly heroic figures as we sat before the roiling storm of magic. That’s right, sat; I’d found a piece of shattered tent strut to use as a makeshift crutch, but when Yuuka’s complaints of a headache had turned into something akin to a migraine, she’d taken a seat on the grass rather than stand. I’d opted to join her. And we were both struggling with the elements; we’d thrown on extra layers to fight the chill, but huddled under them awkwardly. The ground was cold under me as we confirmed our position relative to Alice.

“Ten meters in front of us. You see her?”

“No. Should I?”

Another side effect of the ripple was severe radio interference, so we didn’t actually have contact with Alice. Supposedly, she was just on the other side of the storm.

“Nah, but I can hardly open my eyes to see for myself,” Yuuka admitted. “Hurts like a motherfucker. Let’s just get this done.”

“I’m, uh, following your lead here. Never done this before,” I reminded her, unreasonably ashamed of that fact. “Are we punching an actual tunnel, or just nullifying an area of the storm, or what?”

“Both. We’re locking down, Alice is punching through. You know how {ASH} residue is ripple-inert?”

“Ripple-invisible,” I clarified. “Not exactly going to block anything, is it?”

“The point is that we can make LM that does the same thing, a big block of it that the storm won’t fuck with, right through to the other side. Then Alice can punch a stabilizer lattice using that as a substrate. It’s just a fancy ward, but she has to do it from her side, because of, uh, relative reality baseline bullshit or something—you’re the math cunt, not me.”

“Yeah, I get it. Substrate is relative to our ripple-distorted space, lattice is relative to her baseline, bridges any desync. It’s really just LM?”

She shrugged. “We can’t just stab a spear right through it.”

“I—wasn’t thinking of doing it like Heung,” I lied. “Anyway, I can’t do {MANIFEST}.”

“That’s fine, just gimme your thread, I’ll stitch it in.”

It was kind of a relief to summon my Flame; as uncomfortable as the blazing-white fire was, I welcomed the heat in my numb fingers. There was no need to hurt it, either; I had more than enough pain to offer it right now—and it seemed eager to spring forth. I was distantly relieved that it only erupted from my hand’s scars, as usual; I’d been a little worried that all my raw, altered skin might serve as an ignition point and I’d go up in a self-inflicted magical fireball. The clump of pale, living magic coalesced into a spool of thread around my forearm and hand; that part had become familiar, though the quality of the thread still left a lot to be desired.

“Sorry about how rough it is—what the fuck?”

Yuuka’s Flame wasn’t white like mine, and it didn’t come from her hand. Her bangs were being pushed out of her face by wind that wasn’t there, exposing her damaged eye. It poured thick droplets of grey Flame tinged with dark red, oozing out from the gemstone eyeball like blood in zero-gravity. She snapped her hand outward, and the Flame-blobs followed, swirling around her arm and coating it like a grey gauntlet. She grinned at me wildly, eye bleeding magic, then beckoned for my thread. I held my forearm toward her, and she plucked the tip of my thread in her gauntlet and tugged.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. She closed her fist, then opened it slowly, and now a lattice of thread was spun between her fingers. She drew her hand back slowly, glyphs spinning themselves into existence in her hand’s wake, my thread woven through hers in a way that felt uncomfortably intimate. Then she clenched her fist again, and lattice…manifested.

It was a simple geometry, just a box the shape and size of an eighteen-wheeler’s trailer, lying on the grass and stretching from right in front of us into the storm until it faded from view. The light caught it wrong—it was a neutral grey, but it looked unshaded, and if I couldn’t see its silhouette, I wouldn’t have known where the front met the sides.

A cheer erupted from the cultists behind us, even though it was just a featureless block. For them, it must have been a miracle—I was just glad we’d done our part.

“That’s it?”

“For us, yeah.” Yuuka’s bangs had fallen back over the cursed eye, but did nothing to hide the self-satisfied look on her face. “Alice should be doing her part any second now.”

“And then we can start evac?”

“Yeah.”

Compared to the size of the park, this box would be one hell of a bottleneck, but that also worked to our advantage; Sugawara’s people wouldn’t be able to slip out undetected. Yuuka flicked her wrist, banishing her Flame and relinquishing mine, which hissed back toward me and returned to its spool, sending pinpricks through the bones of my arm. I let my Flame go and shook out my hand, wincing.

We waited. First a few seconds, then half a minute, then a full minute. She frowned.

“Something’s wrong.”

“Is that code for we’re about to be attacked, or more magical in nature?”

“Second.” She got to her feet, brushing the dirt off her butt. “I don’t—aw, fuck.”

“What?”

She sat back down, swearing. “Hina’s fucked it up worse than I thought.”

“Meaning?”

“This was a giant field of white ripple. So the storm’s bad, but more importantly…”

“…It’s amplified—more desync between inside and outside than there normally should be,” I finished, and she nodded. “So it won’t work?”

“It will, ‘cause Alice is strong, but she’ll—wait, do you know about that?”

“Uh. About what?”

“What happens when she uses too much magic.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. “Oh no. It’s going to push her…” I blanked on the word. “Dragon transformation?”

Yuuka nodded, lips pursed. “Dragon-ka.”

“We should stop her. There’s—there’s got to be another way.”

“Nope, not unless you want to wait for the storm to die off. Ai isn’t strong enough, and Hikanome’s other couple of flamebearers outside don’t—”

The featureless block of LM imploded with an awful whistling sound. The front end facing us crinkled inward like paper caught in a vacuum cleaner. We both flinched at the noise, covering our ears as the interior of the rectangular prism was devoured from within until it vanished, leaving only the edges of the box—and a stable tunnel to the outside world. There were familiar colors at the far end of the tunnel, the red-and-blue flashes of emergency lights silhouetting an unmistakable figure, one whose tail hung between her legs. I couldn’t make out how the magic had changed her body at this distance.

The people watching behind us cheered even louder. I was glad I didn’t know what they were saying, singing our praises or praying or just celebrating—but cultish worship aside, it was sort of a dream come true. I’d saved people with magic. It felt good. I turned to face them—

“I see her,” Yuuka said, urgency in her voice.

“What? Who? Alice?”

“Takagiri. My eye’s, uh, unclogging a bit now,” she explained. “She’s in the crowd, or will be soon. Was probably waiting for the tunnel to open so she could slip out after you.”

My tattoo itched as I scanned the crowd, looking for the face I remembered. No luck. “Fuck. So what do we do?”

“You? Stay out of my way.” There was something odd in her tone—I looked over and saw that the grin was crawling back over her face as she stared into the crowd. “I can see her. The rest doesn’t matter.”

Author’s Note:

Disaster! Escalation! Confrontation! What a mess Hina’s made. And at last Ez has to confront the silly lie she dragged him into. Shoulda just told Alice in the first place, smh.

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

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January 24, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

I cannot talk about Dad’s death without discussing infernos, and it is difficult to discuss infernos, especially those of the firestorms, without first explaining free ripple, or ambient ripple. That’s the stuff that brings uncontrolled magical effects, be it from natural sources or as the runoff of flamebearer magic. Though the exact effects are myriad, on the whole, there is an obvious analogy to radiation.

In nature, both can be found in relatively trace quantities, and indeed, there is strong evidence of a link between the two: like how Earth’s magnetosphere shields us from the majority of the sun’s constant barrage of radiation, ambient free ripple also flows from the earth’s geomagnetic North Pole. This is believed to be why flamefall generally travel from north to south—though it’s not known why all colors of ripple seem to obey this law instead of just blue, the color typically associated with such physical phenomena. This northward gradient of ambient ripple had also been speculated to be the reason—or at least a reason—for the Spire’s location in the North Atlantic.

The resemblance to radiation continues into the effects on the human animal. The body can cope with the quantities found in nature in the short term, and even adapt in the long term; just as the skin will produce melanin in response to UV, prolonged exposure to ripple causes the bone marrow to produce ripple-reactive agents, microscopic-scale natural glyphs that convert ambient ripple to green and thereby cause the mild mutations that are common at the higher latitudes and other regions that happen to be hotspots of free ripple. This marvelous phenomenon of biology was one of a precious few glimpses at the natural principles underlying glyphcraft that had yet been observed, back when I was meeting with Hikanome in that mirage of Yoyogi Park.

As with radiation, when we step from the natural world to the works of man, things get far nastier. High intensities of free ripple or radiation will rapidly degrade tissue; past a certain threshold, both will kill you in minutes, if not seconds. Near an inferno—the flamefall or magical disaster kind, not the politicized VNT kind—reality begins to break down. If you’re lucky, you die quickly from having your pieces rearranged and split as space and matter lose cohesion. If you’re not, you die slowly and painfully from a mix of spatial, mutagenic, and matter-altering effects while the qualia and basic information of your existence get shredded and put back together in a ransom-note collage of suffering that may extend far beyond where reason would normally dictate you are entitled to the sweet release of death.

In this, the chaos of ripple, magic run amok, far outstrips even the wildest comic book notions of radiation. It is a worse way to die than anything that existed before the Frozen Flame arrived.

It’s what happens to a flametouched who goes infernal. It’s what happened to Dad.

—

“No.”

“Ezzen,” Hongo began, spreading his hands reasonably, “this is not an attempt to make you relive your trauma. We both want to better understand what happened on the first day of the firestorms.”

“What’s in it for you? Your interest isn’t scientific,” I spat. “What are you even hoping to find? He was killed by a force of nature, and he suffered. I suffered.” I raised my burned hand, blinking away the tears threatening to well in my eyes. I couldn’t show weakness in front of these jackals. “If you have as much respect for me as this whole reception implies, then how could you even suggest putting me through that again? And if you can bring back some fragment of the dead—” I gestured at the too-empty facsimile of the park that surrounded us. The branches overhead might have been covered with leaves now, but that didn’t mask the feeling of being caught in a net “—which I can’t possibly verify is anything more than a parlor trick when you’ve got me isolated like this—then you’d be putting him through that too. It’s sick.”

My anxiety had boiled over into defiant frustration. In a way, this was worse than outright hostility or a physical attack; it was an insult to Dad’s memory. My interest in magic had begun in an attempt to understand, scientifically speaking, what had happened to Dad. I wasn’t going to let these charlatans convince me that his death had been for some “higher purpose.”

I searched their faces for any sign of contrition. Kimura avoided eye contact, looking down, lips pressed together in a thin line. Hongo seemed frustrated, almost imperious—good. Miyoko met my eyes, face level. Her voice was still soft, but not gentle.

“We know why the dragon sent you. We know what she wants from us. This is what we ask in exchange: a chance to learn truths about the Light from you.”

Hongo picked up after her before I could rebut. “Suppose we’re right, little Heron. If the Flame you carry now is connected to both that day and to the Spire—think about what that would mean. Think about the leverage that could give you in going there, in escaping the PCTF. The Vaetna are avoiding you and the others who carry your blessing, when they should have been the ones to save you. Don’t you want to know why?”

“Escaping the PCTF,” I repeated. “You sold Amane to them.”

That at last got a rise out of Miyoko. Those creepy eyes with the space behind them began to glow, flickering pink. I was glad to have gotten under her skin with that—now we were talking about something other than the worst day of my life. Hongo also bristled, but Kimura raised his hand to stay them both. 

“We did not hand over one of our own to those butchers. Sugawara did, and that is why we helped Toudai destroy him.”

His voice was angry in a distant way, disinterring memories of a dark time. Served him right. “They said you helped him,” I countered.

“Coercion. He was going to hurt somebody I loved.”

“And that stopped you? Some gods you are.”

Something flashed in his eyes, but he didn’t rise to the bait. “It was too dangerous to oust him. Too costly. The only reason we survived was because we only faced his supporters, not the military men he paid. That was Takehara-san’s job.”

“Mahou shoujo don’t fight wars,” I quoted, but I couldn’t put any acrid bite into it; I knew it was hollow. My stomach dropped as I remembered how the girls had gone along with my plan, aided and abetted the idea of an artillery strike while carefully dodging the facts of what we had been going to do to the human beings aboard Thunder Horse. The person I’d watched melt—I had inflicted on him the same degree of horrible death that the wild Flame had done to my dad, because I had thought it was the right thing to do. And so had the team of magical girls I now called roommates. “O—okay, yeah, I hear it. That’s bullshit,” I admitted, sobering, guilt tempering my anger. “But I still trust them more than you.”

“Hm.” Hongo was examining me in a way that made my tattoo itch. “So you’ve seen something of what they do.”

“They want us to face the PCTF directly,” Kimura continued, “and Takehara-san knows that will be far more costly. That is why she’s offering you. It is a fair trade.”

“She didn’t know you were going to pull this stunt.”

“You really believe that?” said Hongo, smirking. “Arranging for you to meet us separately from Miss Ishikawa and Miss Hirai? The dragon knew we would know your history, the things that make you unusual and exceptional. She knew we would do this, and trusted us enough to allow it to happen. So you can keep thinking we’re monsters and wonder why she would allow it, or you could trust her and us, but you cannot mistrust us without also mistrusting her judgment.”

I swallowed, remembering how Alice had been so pushy about me attending, how I’d been kept relatively in the dark about what to expect from this meeting. “My—my answer is no.”

Hongo’s smirk shifted into a more genuine smile and an approving nod. “Backbone is important for our kind.”

“As you wish,” Miyoko affirmed, impassive once more. She rose to her feet, robes draping around her, though they still fell below her shoulders and chest. I found that I was already pretty numb to the nudity. “We will not ask again, not today. We only ask you to spare it some thought as you enjoy the festival. We will not give Toudai our full support without understanding the circumstances that brought you here, from the beginning. It could inform much about what is to come.”

Hongo stood as well. “They say the Peacies are going to make their first moves soon. I don’t suppose Miss Hirai gave you a timeline?”

I bit my lip. I’d overheard the three-week number Yuuka had given, and it had been four days since then. I wasn’t supposed to leak information—but they obviously already knew about Yuuka’s foresight, and it was mutually beneficial for me and Todai if Hikanome knew how long we had, right?

“…two weeks, give or take.”

“Then we’ll ask again on the first of March.” Ten days from now. He checked his watch. “The ladies are about to wrap up their entrance. Thank you for your time, little Heron. Miyoko-san?”

Miyoko nodded. The space around us began to glow. I smelled woodsmoke as the bubble of private reality began to fizzle away and the true space of Yoyogi Park began to bleed in. Kimura stood as well.

“We are not the cult you think we are, Ezzen. This festival is a celebration of light and warmth, not a show of power. You are welcome to walk the grounds and see the way we live. But first, come eat with us. There are many things we would like to discuss with you, things that are not so dark.”

—

It was a palpable relief to see Amane. Yuuka too, begrudgingly, but it was especially reassuring to see Radiance Amethyst’s towering form raise a crystalline arm to wave at me as she approached the true VIP section.

When Miyoko’s illusion or pocket dimension or whatever it had been had fully dissipated, the priests’ handmaids and staff had quickly moved in to upgrade our seating arrangement. Bamboo mats had been laid over the tarp and more sitting pillows had been procured, and a long, low table made of beautiful, wine-dark red wood had been placed in the center. Despite the grander displays of wealth, I definitely preferred this to being three on one on their turf. The bare branches and pale winter sky also helped dispel that feeling of being in somebody else’s territory—proof that whatever the cult might claim, reality would ultimately win out. And now it was three on three.

Amane and Yuuka dropped their mantles as they made their way to the table. The glimmering mecha was replaced by the straight-backed, raven-haired girl with piercing green eyes, wearing a polite smile and a purple sundress; Yuuka’s impractically layered outfit of dark belts and laces was replaced by a slightly more reasonable corset, blouse, and skirt, long bangs shrouding her eye. The five flamebearers exchanged a long series of greetings in Japanese, including stiff bowing from all parties. The conversation sounded friendly enough, or at least polite, though there was a moment where Kimura and Yuuka glared at each other in a way that suggested a lot of history.

Waitstaff appeared around us as the introductions concluded and people took their seats. We flamebearers sat three on three at the head of the table; myself, Amane, and Yuuka facing Kimura, Miyoko and Hongo. To our left, down the remaining twelve seats of the table, was an assortment of both groups’ staff, as well as people who looked like representatives of other organizations involved in the event. Todai’s people and the third parties were fully dressed; Hikanome’s people were not. I was distantly relieved that Yuuka didn’t subscribe to their nudism; Like Miyoko, Amane was slender enough that I could have mostly filtered the exposed breasts from my peripheral vision, but Yuuka would have been intolerably distracting.

“Hey, Ezzen.”

“Hi.”

Amane had her phone out, already typing into her translation app.

How did it go?

“Well enough,” I muttered. “They made me an offer. Not to join, but they have conditions for helping us with the…stuff.” I didn’t particularly want to discuss the details of it in front of them, and the three had said they wouldn’t bring it up again today. “I didn’t realize they’d isolate me. Felt a little ambushed.”

Amane winced.

I was hoping they wouldn’t. You’re alright?

“I’m good.” I was actually pretty proud of how I’d handled myself; no big secrets given away, as far as I could tell.

“Yeah, you’re good,” Yuuka verified. “We told ya they wouldn’t hurt ya, no matter how bad you fucked it up.”

“We would never,” Hongo cut in. “And so far, he’s exceeded expectations when it comes to propriety.”

“Nah, really?”

Hongo winced theatrically. “He must have set a truly awful first impression with you if your prediction was so far off the mark.”

To my surprise, Yuuka laughed. “I mean, he’s fucking Hina, ‘course my expectations were low.”

Amane elbowed her teammate, hard, with her mechanical arm. It didn’t make contact; Yuuka’s hand had already been moving to catch the blow, and Miyoko exhaled a rather unladylike snort at the roughhousing. “He does look somewhat like her, no?”

“Mhm,” Yuuka replied, twisting to flag down a waiter.

“What do you mean by that?” I asked. I certainly didn’t look like Hina—wrong sex, wrong race, wrong height, wrong hair. They must have meant in a more magical sense; was there a connection between Yuuka’s eye and Miyoko’s? Perhaps Miyoko’s too-deep irises were pink- or white-ripple equivalents of Yuuka’s, though they were obviously structurally different. Yuuka’s looked almost prosthetic, like an intrusion or growth, whereas Miyoko’s seemed more supernatural.

“You’ve paid in blood quite a few times for someone blessed only eight days ago,” Hongo pointed out, and I frowned.

“That’s not…”

But it was definitely true at this point. Between my spear, my foot, when I’d struck Hina, and of course last night’s impulsive, full-body epilation, I really did seem to be developing a troubling propensity for blood magic. “My abilities to design complex lattices are much stronger than my practical ability to weave them, for now,” I hedged. “And done carefully, sanguimancy is still safer than fully unbound magic.”

Hongo gestured at me as though presenting me to Yuuka. “See? He can make decent excuses! Though I do take some issue with the idea that glyphcraft is the only way to safely utilize magic, and I contest that you’ve been particularly careful. Removing all the hair from your body the night before an event like this is bold. Some would call it reckless, or pain-seeking.”

I was annoyed and a little alarmed that he’d identified exactly what I’d done, but stood my ground. “It was worth it.”

“Your hair really is beautiful,” Kimura said quietly, sipping from a tall glass of beer. A waiter offered me a slightly different glass which I accepted hesitantly. “I’ve never seen something like it.”

I gave the drink an investigatory sniff and was pleasantly surprised to find that it was ginger ale rather than beer. Amane nudged me. I looked back at her. “What?”

She mouthed something. I frowned, not sure what she meant. Yuuka groaned. “Ezzen, say thank you for the compliment.”

“Oh. Thanks.” I reddened, shrinking into myself, feeling too exposed and unable to hide from Yuuka’s counter-gesture indicating my fuck-up to Hongo. This thin shirt provided no protection, no armor; a hoodie might have been sweltering to wear in the magically adjusted temperate weather, but it would have given some security, helped hide that I didn’t know what to do with my hunched shoulders. The weight of my hair draped over my back helped a little, sort of emulating the feeling of a hood hanging behind my neck, and I tried to focus on that; at least my back was covered.

Should I say something more in response? He’d already complimented my hair earlier; I wasn’t sure why he was bringing it up again. Normally, I’d talk about the interesting magical implications of my possibly cyborg nature, but Hikanome had expressed enough distaste with that topic that I wasn’t sure if it would make me look more like a fool. Better to just say nothing at all?

Amane rescued me by raising her glass and calling down the table. The toast was in Japanese, so I don’t know exactly what was said, but whatever it was, it was cheerful and confident, delivered in her bright, strong voice. Something she said got a laugh from the table, then everybody raised their mugs, and the first plates of food began to hit the table.

“Thanks,” I whispered to Amane as a plate of chicken skewers was placed before me, charcoal-smoky and glazed in soy sauce.

“No problem.”

—

The food was exceptional. The theme was flame-cooking, and sure, that meant skewers and steaks, hot dogs and burgers—but it also meant brick oven pizzas and flatbreads, raclette and octopus all sharing the table. There was an entire row of grills, griddles, and ovens set up parallel to the table, which constantly brought new delicacies and interesting twists on more familiar foods. I crunched down on a piece of duxelles that had been broiled to a crispy, chip-like consistency on extremely hot cast iron and washed it down with ginger ale. The drink was arguably the highlight; it had an intense, spiced edge to it without tasting of alcohol, and it was nice and cool to refresh my palate after eating food that had come off of open flame moments prior.

We didn’t make much conversation for the first few minutes, mostly consumed in the universally human act of savoring really good food. Normal human or flamebearer, we all could take some enjoyment from it. To my right, I was happy to see that Amane was enthusiastically digging in; it would have been a shame if her stomach condition had prevented her from partaking.

Conversation began to resume around the third course. I twirled a fork in my small bowl of assassin’s spaghetti while Amane and Hongo discussed something in Japanese. Foreign policy, if I had to guess; my Japanese was still awful, but I was definitely picking up “America” here and there. Yuuka cut in in English—for my benefit? That didn’t seem like her.

“They keep making offers to Ai. They can’t buy her out, but they’re trying. Nervous about the new patterns we saw last month in Taiwan, feel like they’re losing the arms race with China. ‘s stupid, she’d never help make exos.”

Hongo nodded. “It’s the principle of it. If they offer and she refuses, they have it on paper where she stands. They’re not going to make an offensive in the South China Sea, though, not with the situation with the Spire.”

“Situation?” Yuuka bit down on a slice of mayo pizza, one of the few things on the table I wasn’t willing to try. “It’s the same shit as ever. Vaetna make a clusterfuck in some other country, don’t clean it up properly, the big boys reach for their guns, and then when they’ve fully pivoted to face the Spire, they get stabbed in the back by one of the others.”

Finally, a conversation I actually felt qualified to participate in. I took another swig of ginger ale, then spoke up. “I think that’s uncharitable. Er, to the Vaetna’s interventions.”

“Oh, do ya? Really. ‘Course you would gobble their knobs.”

“They do clean up their messes.”

“Only when the big guys actually get scared and don’t try to escalate, and that’s happening less and less. So more escalation, more messes.”

Here we go. I braced; I’d heard this line of argument before, and it always ended back at Dubai.

“Sometimes—”

“—you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette. Shut the fuck up.”

That earned her another elbow from Amane. Miyoko spoke up, leaning forward as she twirled a chicken skewer in her fingers.

“Ezzen, you believe the Spire’s humanitarian efforts outweigh the consequences of their interventions?”

“Yes.” The response was automatic.

“Why?”

“Because it’s a net good. Toppling petty warlords, clearing droughts, pre-empting superhurricanes and taking point on infernos—those directly save lives! And that’s not even counting the Spire itself; there’s a reason their quality of life is the highest in the world, and it has everything to do with their medicine and hydroponics.”

“Quality of life,” Hongo repeated approvingly. “For the average person. That’s what communities should do.”

“Says the cult leader,” I noted dryly.

“I’m agreeing with you! We believe the same things the Spire does. Magic should be used to create a better world for everyone living in it, not hoarded for one’s own interests.”

I blinked. “Clarify? You think the Vaetna should rule the world?”

“You think they should not?”

I sighed. “That’s—it’s complicated. In a world where the average person knew what was good for them, yeah. In practice…I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m uncomfortable with anybody ruling the world, Vaetna or not. And when it comes to them specifically, so many people don’t trust the Vaetna. For faulty reasons, you know?”

Hongo smiled. “Please go on.”

“Well…alright,” I said, mentally gearing up. “Do you know the story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas?” I got some nods, but Kimura shook his head. “It’s—almost fifty years old now, so pre-firestorms, pre-Raising, pre-magic. It’s about a utopia that runs on the torture of a single child, basically, and whether that trade-off is worth it. I think we can all see the parallels to the real world these days, yeah?” More nods. “My problem with it is that…well, people assume that any utopia, any place where people are happy, has to have a catch, a dark side. It’s why people accuse the Vaetna of blood magic or ruling the Spire with an iron fist, all that bosh. They refuse to believe that people with that much power can create a society that’s unambiguously good, no catch. And I just think that’s—such a backwards, 20th-century way of looking at the world.”

“I would say the same argument applies to Hikanome.”

I snarled; how could they say that when Amane was sitting literally right here? “What? No, you demonstrably based your success on child slavery—”

“And we destroyed that side of us,” Kimura interrupted. “No more, never again. Now we heal the sick and shelter the homeless without keeping bodies in the basement.”

“And more than that,” Hongo picked up once he swallowed a bite of his overloaded hot dog, “we put our thumb on the scales of policy to end those problems at the source. We fund housing and lobby to keep rent down rather than merely sweeping homeless people out of sight.” He gestured at Yuuka. “Miss Hirai is here today because we are lending our blessings to environmental groups to help reduce pollution. Make no mistake—we could rule Japan if we wanted to, but that is not what we were given these blessings to do. How are we different from the Vaetna, Little Heron?”

“I’m not interested in arguing what you do for your tax write-offs.”

“Fuckin’ oath, ‘Little Heron’, do you not see your hypocrisy here?” Yuuka sneered. “It’s the same shit. And the Vaetna didn’t help me find Amane. Get off your high fuckin’ horse.”

I deflated, looking guiltily at the cyborg girl between us. She was clearly having trouble keeping up with the conversation, but when her name came up, she seemed to understand what it meant. She sighed something at Yuuka, who shook her head angrily. 

“It seems to me,” Miyoko said, looking between the three of us, “That you see something divine in the Vaetna, Ezzen. You may not worship them, but you recognize their higher calling.”

“Well—they’re not omnipotent,” I begrudgingly admitted, shamefaced. I had no rebuttal for Yuuka.

“But you wish they were. That is faith.”

“Everyone believes in something,” Kimura added. “You think we are not deserving of the same trust you extend to them, because you believe that they are ordained to do good and we are not.”

I felt I had to push back on that—then my skin crawled. The hair on my neck would have stood on end if I still had any. Instinct had me look straight up, guided by some perception of my Flame. I realized all five other Flamebearers had done the same. Yuuka swore.

“What?” I couldn’t pin down exactly what I was sensing.

Amane pointed, and I saw it. An ultramarine dot was moving across the pale-blue sky, vivid and aglow, brighter each moment. My heart leapt. My phone buzzed, and I scrambled to get it out.

Hina: I FIGURED IT OUT

Ezzen: figured what out?

Hina: the stalker. she’s with hikanome i can smell her somewhere down there with you

My blood ran cold, eyes darting around before they locked on Miyoko. Amane and Yuuka both put fingers to their ears, then a change passed over them. They both tensed, looking at the Hikanome flamebearers with the same suspicion I had, but with warriors’ poise rather than my prey-animal panic.

Ezzen: What do we do? We’re literally sitting across from the leaders right now.

Hina: sit tight cutie

Hina: the girls have your back

“Ezzen,” Yuuka said slowly, injecting casual friendliness into her voice. “Wanna walk around the park? There’s plenty of stuff to do.”

“Y—yeah, that sounds good.”

Ezzen: and you?

Hina: what do you think

Hina: im going hunting

Ezzen: Uh. Maybe this should wait until after?

The blue dot in the sky was getting bigger.

Ezzen: Hina?

“Ah,” breathed Hongo. “I don’t suppose any of you can stop her?”

“Stop her from what?”

“She’s gonna break open the whole white ripple bubble,” Yuuka explained, alarm in her voice. “What the fuck is this—ittatata—fuck!” She clutched the side of her head, sucking in a breath through clenched teeth, then whipped around to stare at—Kimura, who had risen to his feet, looking up at the approaching sapphire fireball. She growled. “What the fuck?”

The middle-aged businessman met Yuuka’s eye, then looked at me. Was he—but he couldn’t be, right? I frantically went back to my phone.

Ezzen: DONT

Ezzen: youll amke an inferno. its not worth it, im not in danger

Ezzen: just come down normally and we can talk

Hina: yuuka will get it

Hina: stay safe, love you

The others at the table, the humans, had taken notice, and gasping turned to yelling as it became clear Hina wasn’t going to stop. Hongo and Miyoko were asking Kimura frantic-sounding questions, but he just shook his head. He looked at me one last time, then shattered into glass, splintered fragments that burned away into smoke. Like before.

Certainty took root in my stomach. He’d been the one providing the magic for my stalker, whomever she’d been. That was why Hina was here—but her response was still wildly disproportionate. Why did she seem ready to go to war? I turned to Amane and Yuuka, who were both staring at where Kimura had been. Rage was written on their faces. What was I missing?

“What the fuck is going on?”

Yuuka barked something at Miyoko. The high priestess scowled at the place where Kimura had been, pristine and delicate features twisting with fury.

“Traitor.”

Then the sky split open as Radiance Sapphire cracked Hikanome’s eggshell of false summer.

---

Author’s Note:

Ezzen’s biases are starting to show, but more importantly: Hina’s back! Did you miss her? I missed her. I wonder what she learned!

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January 17, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

There were a lot of things that sucked about the morning of Hikanome’s event.

First and foremost was the pain. I could feel what I had done to my body last night as a low-level burning, scratchy sensation, not unlike a rash. Every place where a hair follicle had been removed and backfilled by new flesh was its own pixel of discomfort which together formed a high-resolution screen of itching and irritation, lighting up wherever my clothes pressed against my body.

That brought me to the second thing that sucked: Ebi had rinsed my bloody afterbirth off of me and taken me back to my room after I’d passed out, for which I was grateful, but overnight, my new skin had oozed more fluids, disgusting side-effects of the adjustment process as the polyps of replacement flesh made themselves at home in my meat-suit. I’d woken to find my sheets thoroughly soiled by bio-gunk of all sorts, sticky all over from a mixture of sweat and pus. The smell had been the worst part, so rank and oily that despite my inflamed skin’s sensitivity I had beelined for the shower to rinse all the horrible slime off my body, still only half-awake.

It was only when I stepped under the shower’s water that I remembered what my Flame had given me in exchange for my body hair. My wig was fused with my head and had changed color to a truly bizarre shade, a color between yellow blond and bright-orange ginger but somehow distinctly unnatural, too bright to appear on a regular human head. I’d had to reach out of the shower and fumble for the light switch to verify that it was merely a very bright color and not literally aglow. My scalp was actually one of the few places of my body that didn’t hurt from the aftermath of the blood magic. 

Clothes sucked as well. No hoodie for me, not today—Alice had forced me into a button-down and slacks, plus a long coat that insulated from the cold well enough but still left me feeling overly exposed. A silver lining of our hurry to get me dressed and out the door was that I was spared the full lecture from Alice about the stupidity of what I’d done; she seemed relieved that my skin was merely red and inflamed rather than one giant burn scar, and I was subjected to only small mutterings about the shock of orange hair. She’d warned me that we had to talk about it later, but she needn’t have; I was already mulling it over by myself, silently gnawing on the ramifications as I was ushered into the waiting limo separately from the other two attending Radiances.

What exactly had happened, physiologically and magically speaking? Had my old hair under the wig gone poof, annihilated entirely? Had the Flame that had manifested the LM been permanently integrated into my body? The texture felt like real hair, as far as I could tell. Was it alive and growing? Was it magical in some way, other than the color?

We didn’t have time to test those things, but at least these weren’t entirely uncharted waters. Alice, too, had hair changed by her Flame. Then again, her shimmering, opalescent off-white was comparatively natural, some ways removed from how my body had incorporated a piece of magitech hardware. By some estimates, including Amane’s, that made me a cyborg. Ai, the resident authority on cybernetics, couldn’t be reached for comment, and her absence was another thing that sucked. She was still fast asleep by the time we were out the door, forbidden from being roused on Ebi’s orders. I was a little peeved that she got to sleep in and I still had to attend despite the fact that I was the one recovering from a full-body application of sanguimancy.

Amane: Think about it this way: you have little confidence in your appearance, but nobody will pay attention to your appearance other than the hair.

Ezzen: I guess, yeah.

Ezzen: Changes the first impression somewhat

Amane: For the better, I think.

Ezzen: I’m still nervous.

Amane: That’s normal!

I cringed a little at the non-sequitur detour into talking about my own feelings, but far less than I would have if this conversation were happening face to face. I hoped she wouldn’t mind.

Amane: What are you nervous about?

There was a lot—general social anxiety, the specific fear of screwing up etiquette, getting lost in the more benign cases or outright attacked or kidnapped in the more extreme ways things could go, fretting over my appearance. But vis-a-vis Amane…

Ezzen: It seems crazy that we’re splitting up.

Amane: We’re right in front of you.

Amane: And the bodyguards are good.

We were traveling in a little three-car motorcade, with Yuuka and Amane in the first, me—and Clipboard, who looked as nervous as I felt—in the second, and two more senior Todai staff in the rear, plus a driver and bodyguard in each car. The latter made me especially uncomfortable.

Ezzen: As meatshields?

That was a bit of a blunt way to say it, but accurately grim. If hostile flamebearers decided to attack our convoy, regular humans might as well be ants, and the cars around us effectively made of tissue paper.

Amane: They’re not that delicate. They have the same ward devices you do.

I was wearing a compression sleeve on my right arm, which manifested strong enough repulsion fields to turn away a blade or keep me from getting crushed if the car were to be rammed. More importantly, it also projected a sort of stability matrix across my body so that somebody couldn’t just pulp my insides remotely with magic. The armband itched incessantly against my still-raw skin. I couldn’t even scratch it properly, hidden under my shirt’s long sleeves, and it just made me feel more uncomfortable rather than safer. The Radiances had proper wards, high-power burst shields that made them near-invulnerable long enough to transition into their mantles. I had no such safety; most of my protection came in their assurances that there was nobody out to get us today.

This was supposed to be safe, diplomatic—even fun, from how I’d heard it described. Before the debacle with my hair, Alice had called it a mix of a traditional Japanese matsuri festival and a cookout. Yuuka had corroborated by calling it a “barbie;” I still didn’t know why her lingo was so Australian and had been dissuaded from asking by her demeanor—on that note, I also didn’t understand the sudden shift in her behavior at dinner yesterday. It had continued into this morning; she’d given me a begrudging compliment on the way down to the garage, when it had just been us three flamebearers in the elevator:

“You lost the stubble.”

“Huh? Yeah.”

“Was the right call. Tell me you didn’t choose that dye job, though.”

“I didn’t.”

“Good.”

I hadn’t known how to respond to that. It was an improvement from her outright hostility, but being in the dark about whatever had passed between the team was doing my anxiety no favors. Maybe it had something to do with Hina’s prolonged absence, but that itself sucked too. I could have used her confidence and energy today, and her sheer physicality would have gone a long way to settle my unease and feeling of nakedness. Also, some shameful part of me hoped she’d like the new hair—though it occurred to me that she might be disappointed that we’d not have another session of zapping away body hair.

I made an effort to steer my thoughts away from my girlfriend. Alice had assured me she was fine, and that was good enough. Regardless of the state of our relationship, I had bigger fish to fry today.

—

We felt Hikanome’s influence well before Yoyogi Park came into view. I’d been avoiding looking out the window, instead mulling over what little I knew of the cult and internally rehearsing the greetings we’d drilled, but a chance glance to the side of the road contained something amiss. The sidewalk was crowded with people walking the same direction we were driving; that wasn’t surprising given that the estimated attendance was to be at least three hundred thousand over the course of the day, but the attire seemed off. Some people were dressed in what I could identify as traditional Japanese garb, robes with thick belts and awkward-looking sandals, but many others seemed underdressed for the weather. T-shirts and crop tops abounded, and the longer I examined the crowd as we drove past, I began to pick out people who were entirely shirtless in the February cold, men and women alike. I averted my eyes before they could wander nippleward.

Ezzen: People are naked on the sidewalk.

Amane: They are!

Ezzen: A little cold for that, isn’t it?

Amane: In about thirty seconds, you’ll feel the air change.

Amane: Don’t panic and don’t worry about me.

As I read those messages, there was a burst of radio chatter between the drivers, and then I felt it. A sunny, suffusing warmth blossomed in my chest and spread outward, like the first rays of dawn on a summer morning except felt all the way through my body. What residual chill had crept into my limbs was chased away, melted and evaporated. Some of the pain across my skin lessened, too, the inflammation soothed by the warmth.

We’d just entered a field of red ripple the size of an entire neighborhood. At least, I assumed it was red; a magical effect stimulating the body’s thermoreceptive nerves to trick us into feeling warm seemed far more magically efficient than a blue-based effect that could actually warm the air at such a scale. More culty, too, a parlor trick to demonstrate their power while also dosing you with something that naturally felt good. I was naturally suspicious, and furthermore, if it was red ripple—

Ezzen: You okay?

Amane: 大丈夫

Amane: I told you not to worry.

Ezzen: …You did, didn’t you.

Ezzen: This is “good weather?”

Amane: It’s not red, so yes.

Ezzen: ??

Amane: Check the temperature on the dashboard.

I leaned sideways, trying to get around the driver’s seat in front of me, squinting.

“20 degrees,” Clipboard said, intuiting what I was trying to do.

“Thanks.”

The outdoor air temperature had gone from a proper wintry chill to a balmy, comfortable spring day in moments.

Ezzen: That’s impossible.

Amane: That’s Hikanome’s magic.

Ezzen: But it’s absurd.

I’d switched from the weather app to a calculator, trying to guess at some numbers in my head. Google said the park was 133 acres—538,000 square meters—and if the effect extended from ground level to, say, three meters in the air, that was far too high of a volume of air to heat by over ten degrees Celsius. It wasn’t just a matter of simple energy requirements; the blue ripple would compound into other physical effects, little ruptures and slips, bursts of kinematic irregularities that could rupture organs if they happened inside a person. And that was to say nothing of the challenge of keeping the intended effect equally distributed and not accidentally heating small sections to dangerous temperatures.

I relayed these findings to Amane.

Ezzen: They literally cannot be that powerful. The numbers don’t track.

Ezzen: There are only three flamebearers attending, right?

Amane: Yes. But your math is making a faulty assumption.

Amane: It’s white ripple, not blue.

I’m ashamed to say how badly that threw me for a loop. It presented an entirely different class of impossibility.

White ripple, like silver ripple, is special in that there are no glyphs that affect it; it is not a color that threads of Flame can be tuned to. It still occurs in nature, of course, and has always been closely associated with the Vaetna. That association led to a misconception that white ripple’s effect was “reality manipulation”, or “imposing one’s will on the world”, but I’d always considered that an unhelpful description. All colors of ripple did those things, defied what had formerly been understood about reality and replaced it with volition made manifest.

In reality, white ripple was better described as “multiplicative” ripple, an X factor that boosted the influence of the other colors of ripple further than they ought to go in the quantities detected. This explanation made sense mathematically and was consistent with its detection around especially great happenings of magic, like infernos, flamefall, and some of the Vaetna’s most extreme acts.

All this was to say that:

Ezzen: An effect can’t solely be white ripple.

Amane: “And Yuuka can’t see silver,” I think you said.

Amane: Have an open mind. Don’t be like Ai.

Ezzen: Working on it.

Really, what unsettled me wasn’t that this flew in the face of my understanding of how magical effects were categorized. No, what bothered me was the idea that this cult was performing magic that I considered the Vaetna’s domain, something above the rest of our station, forces we shouldn’t meddle in. Whatever Hikanome were doing to create this effect flew in the face of the natural order, challenged the Spire’s supremacy in magic.

I didn’t like it at all.

—

I liked it even less when our convoy split. The Radiances had an actual entrance planned, one that I was sure I’d see Star posting about later. It involved them descending from the sky in full mantle, followed by a meet-and-greet. I wondered how Yuuka participated in such things. I could see Amane pulling it off, being smiley and personable, but if there was one thing I had in common with Yuuka, it was that we weren’t extroverts. Granted, for me, it was less about misanthropy and more about how imagining myself as the focus of attention in front of that many people made my stomach do acrobatics.

The point was that Todai had stipulated in the terms of my attendance that I did not have to engage in those celebrity theatrics, and that meant that I was going to enter the park separately from the Radiances. I and the important Todai people in the car behind me were going through the VIP entrance via a closed-off road, barriers and armed guards blocking passage behind us. Once the girls made their flashy entrance, they’d rejoin me, but seeing their car turn away from ours left me feeling very alone.

As the park came into view, my anxiety redoubled. I was entering the belly of the beast.

Yoyogi Park did not feel inviting. For all Hikanome’s impossible aura of pleasant temperatures could mimic the warmth of spring, the mostly barren trees weren’t so easily fooled. They stood dark against the hazy blue of the sky, a reminder of the chilly reality beyond the illusion. That should have been grounding and comforting, but there was a spindly quality to their branches overhead that felt like I was peeking out of a net.

The barriers and guards continued on our right as our reduced group drove further inward. On the other side of the dividing line, the veritable sea of people came back into view. They clustered around canopied tents. Pillars of smoke or steam wafted upward from every other tent, billowing past signs advertising flame-grilled skewers, fish, and even less stereotypically Japanese dishes like kebab and pizza. Food cooked with open flame was the traditional fare for special occasions for Hikanome and many cults like it. If it hadn’t been for the rain of the past few days, the entire event must have constituted a massive fire hazard, given the park’s wintry lack of lush greenery.

Tall braziers burning with magically colored flames designated different areas of the event and imposed some order on the chaotic press of underdressed people. These nearby tents with food were the green section; further away, near the larger pavilions and tents hosting the event’s main attractions and gathering spaces, I could see pink and blue. I had a map of the layout on my phone that explained the color coding, but I doubted I’d use it. As a VIP, there was no need for me to wriggle through sardine-packed crowds just for a few slices of overpriced kebab—we would get a proper reception lunch, possibly the only upside of the entire event.

I had high expectations. My childhood meals had often been the leftovers from truly lavish galas and balls, whatever remained of the thirteen-course meals Dad orchestrated for the rich and famous the previous weekend. It depended on the kind of event, of course. Sometimes, if he was serving art critics or gourmands or particularly picky tech moguls, it would be all jellies and purees, molecular gastronomy advertised not as food but as an experience; those didn’t usually make it to our fridge, either because they were hilariously small portions or became basically inedible ten minutes after serving. But when Dad catered larger events with more conventional fare, he’d bring home things that had made kid-Ezzen’s eyes shine: pieces of a whole spit-roasted pig, rich and creamy vegetable soups, five-cheese mac and cheese with crispy breadcrumbs on top—gourmet versions of kid food, essentially, and in such quantities that I could eat them all week long.

Of such things was childhood made. Pulling open the fridge to discover what delicious secrets it would hold this week was magical every time. Sometimes, on days when he was in the kitchen on the weekend, he’d show me the fancy ways to reheat everything for service—so it had been crushing to realize I’d never eat like that again. It had been a slow kind of grief, waking up in my grandparents’ house and checking the fridge to see shitty Tesco ready meals in place of portioned-out bins of roasted meats and vegetables and grandpa’s beers rather than soup. So, too, after I’d left that horrible, tiny house and moved into my apartment. Leftovers didn’t just make themselves, and I’d had neither the money nor the emotional strength to pick up where Dad had left off.

All this to say that even in the worst-case scenario for today, where we would be treated to some truly bizarre molecular gastronomy—unlikely given Hikanome’s propensity for flame-grilled food—I found myself excited to revisit some small, nostalgic fragment of my childhood, especially since I was dining on the dime of the same type of cult that had stolen my inheritance. There was a nice symmetry to it.

It was this tentative hope that gave me the courage to sit up straight and internally rehearse my greetings one last time as the car rolled to a stop. I’d been lost in thought for the final few minutes of our journey, but now we were here, parked on the grass under the spindly trees. All I had to do was respond when greeted and then shut up; Todai’s higher-ups in the other car were going to do the vast majority of the talking. After that, I could busy myself with eating. Hell, talking about the food was maybe the one line of conversation I felt prepared for. Easy enough. I turned from where I’d been idly staring out the window, looking at my pants and trying to get my unfamiliar cascade of red-gold hair to behave, wincing at the state of my skin. I rolled my right ankle experimentally, making sure the field of white ripple surrounding me wasn’t disrupting the stabilizer module’s function. Everything seemed in order.

“Um, are we getting out first?”

Clipboard didn’t respond. I looked over at him—

He was gone. My heart thudded in my chest as I realized that the driver and bodyguard in the front seat were also absent, and there was no second car behind mine. How had I not noticed them all vanish? Had it just happened moments ago or minutes? My tattoo itched, joined in chorus by the rest of my crawling skin as I realized I was alone in hostile territory. For once, I didn’t reject the impulse, summoning my spear onto my lap, the tip resting in the opposite corner of the footwell. I checked my phone—no signal. I was alone. I undid my seatbelt and scooted into the middle of the car, further from the doors, and looked out the windshield.

That answered one question—wherever I was, it wasn’t Yoyogi Park. Or rather, it still looked like the park, with the same trees in the same places, but it seemed as though it were the middle of summer; the trees were covered in vibrant leaves, and no skyscrapers rose above them in the distance. No throngs of people, either—indeed, nobody at all, except the three sitting on a simple plastic tarp in front of me. I was still awful at names and faces, but I’d bothered to commit these ones to memory. All three wore long, flowing white robes with fire-red trim. Hikanome’s flamebearers, the three I’d been expecting to meet.

A single empty pillow sat in front of them. An invitation.

This glade must have been the epicenter of the air-warming effect. Perhaps this was the true effect, and the warm air beyond was merely a byproduct, leakage from this bubble of contained reality where Hikanome’s leaders had spirited me away for a private audience. Or worse. They weren’t armed, but they didn’t need to be.

Leftmost was Kimura. He bore little resemblance to the picture the Radiances had shown me. There, he’d been a businessman with a receding hairline and a creased face, easily confused for millions of others in Japan. Before me, he looked more like a retired samurai, lounging in stately repose. He was a co-founder of the cult and complicit in what had happened to Amane. His robe was tightly closed.

Rightmost was Hongo. He was older than me by a few years, perhaps in his early thirties. He sat cross-legged, with his back straight, and had a big grin on his face that instantly reminded me of Hina. He was Hikanome’s diplomat and supposedly had a massive crush on Alice—or maybe specifically her tail. His robe was partially undone, slipping down below his shoulders.

Between them, a woman the same age as the Radiances sat with her legs folded below her. Miyoko, the cult’s high priestess. She wore a knowing smile, and her eyes were too piercing. Her robe was entirely undone, leaving her front bare—

I averted my eyes. Seriously, what was it with the toplessness? That hadn’t been in the notes on etiquette they’d given me.

That aside, I was now in a predicament. The three were talking, but all watching me, and I had no doubt they could see me as well as I could see them. Stay in the car? That hadn’t gone so well last time. And I was better prepared, this time. I took a deep breath and reached for my Flame, trying to find the strength it had given me when I’d struck Hina. But no dice—my Flame didn’t respond to the tug. As stressed as I was, I wasn’t angry as I’d been then, and besides, now was not the time to experiment with magical amping effects.

Nothing else to do. I swung open the left door and disembarked spear-first, wincing at how the motion chafed my raw skin, and watched the three warily. They watched me back. Hongo snorted.

“There’s no need for panic.”

I raised my spear. “I’m getting pretty tired of abductions.”

Kimura shook his head at that as though disappointed.

“Abducted?” Hongo scoffed. He spoke English fluently; I’d been told the others were also conversational. “This is a grand welcome! Who do you take us for? The PCTF? Todai’s rabid fox? We’re giving you a greeting worthy of your status, and you draw a blade. Put that away and let us speak together.” He spread his arms.

I didn’t move. “What happened to the people I was traveling with?”

“They’re meeting with their equals,” Kimura replied. He had the voice of a smoker, gravelly, but also softer than I had expected, as though speaking to a frightened animal. “So are you.”

“My equals.” Flamebearers above humans, a near-universal belief among these cults. “I’m free to leave?”

“Yes.”

Hongo rolled his eyes. “Or you could come over here so we can get a good look at you. We don’t bite.”

They had a point; if they wanted to hurt me, it would have already happened. I begrudgingly banished my spear and took a hesitant step toward them, then found my gait and closed the distance, still trying not to look at Miyoko’s chest. I sat awkwardly on the empty pillow, calling up the greetings I’d learned. I bowed my head.

“Um—hajimemashite. Watashi wa—”

All three of them sighed. “Don’t bother.”

“Er. Alright?”

“English is fine. Give us your name,” Hongo urged.

I squinted at him, remembering Ebi’s joke toward Hina about cold iron. They’d already demonstrated that their magic operated outside the rules I knew; it was possible they operated on fae logic and could steal my name if I gave it. This isolated glade was adding to that impression, and I glanced around, wondering if perhaps we were encircled by mushrooms. Why hadn’t I been briefed on this? As for my name, just to be safe—

“Ezzen. Ezzen Colliot. An honor to meet you all.” I bowed my head again, surprised at my own comfort with the courtly affect. “I apologize for drawing my weapon. I had not been informed of this exclusive reception.” I raised my head, attempting to shift my eye contact between the three. “I greet you, priests of the Light.”

Hongo nodded approvingly. “Greetings.”

Kimura nodded more carefully. “Welcome.”

At last, Miyoko spoke as well. Her voice was soft and delicate. “Hello, Ezzen of the Spire.”

That made me stumble. “Huh?”

Hongo nodded again. “I didn’t take you for a believer.”

“Wait, no, go back to the other thing.” I pointed at Miyoko, momentarily emboldened to ignore the nipples. “Of the Spire?”

“That was a Vaetna’s greeting you gave.”

I frowned, then reddened as realization dawned. I had felt comfortable saying it like that because I had been quoting—specifically Heung’s first appearance before the UN.

“And you carry a black-tipped spear,” Hongo continued. “Well met, little Heron.”

“I—no, I’m just a fan—” I felt like I was going to implode, yet I couldn’t help but glow at the comparison. “Thanks, but I’m not the real thing.”

“You’re blessed,” Kimura said surprisingly softly. “The real thing is the real thing. Your hair is beautiful.”

“…Thanks?” The use of the word blessed reminded me that I was dealing with a Flame cult. “It was an accident, not a blessing, and I’m not a believer.”

“Ah, the skeptic engineer type,” Hongo sighed, shifting where he sat. “Like Miss Matsumoto, putting divinity in boxes. What do you think of her? Brainy, isn’t she?”

“Ai is one of the kindest people I’ve ever met,” I shot back, a little wrong-footed by the question.

“Ah.” Kimura’s voice was still soft. “He doesn’t know. You are a he, yes?”

I blinked, even more off-kilter now. “I…yes. What do I not know, exactly?”

“If the lovely dragon didn’t see fit to tell you,” Hongo said, “then neither will we. Has she been good to you?”

I couldn’t see an angle behind this line of questioning, so I hedged. “They did what anybody with the means should have done. I’m grateful.”

“And yet it was them, not the Vaetna. We’ve been wondering why. Haven’t you?”

Ah. I saw the angle. “Whatever their reasoning, I’m sure it was—and is—sound.”

“Of course, of course.” He dismissed the topic with a wave of his hand. “The Spireborn are always justified. But I’d still like to know the reason they abandoned you.”

I gritted my teeth.

“They didn’t abandon me.”

“Don’t torment him,” Miyoko breathed. She leaned forward, spreading her hands slowly on the tarp, watching the plastic crinkle under her palms. The sound made me realize how silent and still this place was; no animals, not even the wind. Against the silence, her quiet voice suddenly seemed loud. “Hongo-san is being uncivil, but there is truth in his words. Strangeness surrounds your Flame, things that do not fit. Twice-touched, being left for the fox instead of taken, the yari kara no kaminari. I did not call you of the Spire for your weapon—you glow like the Vaetna do. Do you not feel it?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means you were chosen,” Kimura said. “We are all chosen by the Light, but you were chosen by the Vaetna.”

That was exciting to hear, but something about this felt off. I reminded myself to be suspicious of any kind of ‘chosen one’ narrative when it came from a trio of fey cult leaders. Alice had told me it was in their interest to make me feel special so they could search for information.

But there were things I couldn’t explain, questions I had no way of answering. Maybe this was connected to why my Flame had a voice—not that I’d tell them that part, if I could avoid it.

“Why would they choose me and then actively avoid me?”

“Maybe you were meant to be taken by the PCTF, as a trojan horse, and the fox’s interference was unforeseen,” Hongo pointed out. “But, as we established, the Vaetna don’t make mistakes.” He grinned.

“They might have,” I admitted. It felt wrong to be the one searching for fault in the Vaetna’s actions. “If that were true.”

“Enough speculation,” Miyoko interrupted, still looking down at her hands. “What is true is that your father was the first to ever join with the Flame.”

“I don’t know about first ever,” I hedged.

“But he was among the first. In an…inferno. What a terrible word.”

“He died. Horribly,” I added, my good humor evaporating. “My grandparents were convinced to give up my inheritance by people like you saying it was a good thing that he burned to death. I’ve long since run out of patience for it.” I bristled, reaching for the formal patterns of speech again. “Respectfully, I find these questions invasive and insensitive.”

Miyoko’s head jerked upward. Her eyes pierced me. Now that I was closer, I saw what was wrong about them; as her head moved, the hazel of her eyes stayed fixed, as though I were peeking through her irises at something behind. I shuddered.

“I do not bring it up lightly, Ezzen of the Spire. We are no pretenders.” She spat the word, straining her voice with disdain. “My Light can reach even the dead.”

“Bullshit. Every supposed ‘necromancer’ in the past seven years has been proven to be a fraud,” I countered. “Even your Blue Spark person.”

Both of the men bristled, but were spoken over by Miyoko’s quiet tones.

“Not necromancy. I cannot bring them back. I cannot even give them a voice. But I can show you.” She leaned further forward, bowing to me. “You are twice-touched, alone of your kind. The first may inform the second. I would ask your father’s spirit to show us what happened to him.”

---

Author’s Note:

The arc’s title begins to make sense! But there may yet be more layers to uncover. Only time (read: me) will tell!

You may have noticed that this site has gotten a facelift! That’s thanks to the hard work of myself and Maria, one of the beta readers. I’m super pleased with how it came out. If you notice any bugs or accessibility issues, by all means leave a comment on this chapter or in the Discord.

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January 10, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

Dysphoria, blood magic. Yeah, it’s one of those chapters.

Who hosts an outdoor event in February?

The Saturday of Hikanome’s festival had seen the rain finally wise up and realize it was unseasonable for this time of year in Tokyo, so it had retreated and left streaky greys across a clear, blue sky which you could tell was chilly just from its hue. The blue was more like a hazy purple from where I rested my head against the limo’s tinted window. Honestly, it was more like a fancy cab, not one of those long limousines Dad and I used to ride sometimes. I winced as we rounded a bend and the centrifugal—centripetal, whatever—force pushed my bad foot against the car door. It was still sensitive.

I caught the reflection of the car’s interior in the window. To my left, on the far side of the limo, the aide Alice had assigned me for the brief journey was dragging a pen up and down his clipboard. He counted the items, double-, triple-, quadruple-checking them. I didn’t know exactly what was written, but I knew they were the safety procedures to get me there in one piece and un-kidnapped, since I wasn’t arriving with the two attending Radiances. They had a more spectacular entrance planned, but had stipulated that if I was to attend, I wouldn’t be held to the same standard of showmanship. I wondered how the man—Clipboard, I was calling him, since I’d instantly forgotten his actual name—saw me. Was I a different kind of entity from the Radiances, in his mind? Then a lock of my new hair slipped off my shoulder and blocked my view of his nervous tic.

Right, my new hair. Hard-earned; harder-earned than it had needed to be.

—

The barber’s shears left me numb. Kamihata was beyond apologetic, but didn’t understand the problem, and had no recourse other than to lead me back to the waiting room couch next to Amane. I stared at my phone and the messages I had sent Sky. The act of sending the messages had helped, barely—the panicked frenzy had ebbed away, replaced by a new kind of stress. The last time I’d sent Sky a DM, it had been to confess my stress about maintaining opsec over Todai’s involvement in the Thunder Horse inferno, the people we’d killed. He hadn’t even responded to that one. Perhaps his silence was itself a message; between that and what I’d sent just now, I might have been putting too many of my problems on his plate.

I reminded myself that I wouldn’t have ended up here without him. He had been the one to put me here with the Radiances instead of at the Spire, so it was his responsibility to help me with the fallout of that life-changing decision he’d made. And more to the point, he knew something that could fix my hair—Ai had mentioned that he’d grown his own with magic. So I waited, and to my relief, he responded.

skychicken: jesus christ ez how bad is the haircut

I started to type a response, but he was faster.

skychicken: okay holy shit actually im putting that on hold for a moment

skychicken: you CANNOT message me about lighthouse’s classified operations

skychicken: thats a huge security risk for you and them and me

ezzen: sorry

ezzen: They already told me.

ezzen: Wait, so you can admit to being a flamebearer, but I can’t talk about VNT activities? Are these chats secure or not?

skychicken: assume theyre not

skychicken: that specific fact about me is something that any listener worth their salt would already know, it doesnt count

Fair enough. I deleted the old message and averted my eyes from the screen, chastised, until a new message popped up in my peripheral vision.

skychicken: okay anyway

skychicken: im assuming those panicky messages are about a bad haircut

I ran my hand through my hair again. The lightness was alien.

ezzen: It’s not even a bad haircut, tbh

ezzen: But it’s way shorter and it feels all wrong and Ai mentioned you knew how to use magic to grow more

ezzen: For context, I performed some glyphless biomodding on myself the other day which I assume is similar to whatever you did since they equated mine to yours via having Hina as a mentor.

skychicken: ez, what did i JUST SAY

ezzen: fuck

I deleted that message, too.

ezzen: Okay without any more details, can you help me or not?

skychicken: i cant, not from here. the radiances CAN, but first

skychicken: is it WORTH using magic for this

skychicken: because itll be blood magic. it will hurt, it will spit red all over, and youre virtually guaranteed other residuals

I hesitated. He was right about the technical details: I did not know how to do this with glyphs. Biomancy was best accomplished through as little biomancy as possible, as the adage went—the green section of the glyph lexicon was the least-developed of any color of ripple other than white and silver. Setting a fractured bone was the kind of problem you could treat as a matter of telekinetics, but accelerating the cellular machinery for hair growth? I lacked both the glyph toolbox and the biology knowledge for that, and I knew better than to just stick my head in a bioacceleration field like the ones on Todai’s medical beds. That was glorified suicide, and I wasn’t that desperate.

I was, however, desperate enough for blood magic. I didn’t understand why, but the gut-deep wrongness and exposed feeling was enough to drive me back to panic or tears if I focused on it. I was only distracting myself by thinking about how I could work the problem.

ezzen: I’ll do it.

I’m grateful Sky didn’t question my conviction. If he had, I might have lost my nerve.

skychicken: okay. ask alice

skychicken: you are REALLY going to want to use the spell circle in the basement

ezzen: Okay, thanks.

With a goal in mind, I became aware of the world around me again. Amane had scooted to my left side and was peering over my shoulder, reading our chat. She shoved her phone between mine and my face.

Are you alright?

I looked at her, at those emerald eyes. One real, one fake. She had lost far more of her body than me—hair grew back, limbs didn’t. I didn’t have the right to be so upset when she’d suffered worse. I instinctively retracted my phone from her gaze.

“It’s—fine. Good enough for the event. Alice wanted me presentable, yeah?”

Amane gave me a look I didn’t know how to interpret and typed something else into her phone.

They shaved my head.

Oh. She ran her hand through the long, glossy strands of black hair.

“And you grew it back.”

It’s a challenge.

“Did—did you use magic?”

No. It took years.

Her face fell, and my hopes followed. If her million-dollar prosthetics and magic weren’t enough, what could Sky have had in mind? She brightened, squaring her shoulders, and called something out to Kamihata as her mechanical fingers danced along the screen.

But in your case, it might only take a few minutes.

—

That’s how it should have gone. Amane’s big plan for me had been to try hair extensions—the kind that fused to your hair with a little heat. I’d always known in theory that hair extensions existed, but like so many other cosmetic products, I’d never had a reason to interact with them. The problem was that even though Kamihata—or rather, Ms. Kamihata, since it was her last name, as I learned through hesitant, stop-and-go small talk—had a small collection of extensions, none matched both the wavy texture of my hair and the near-black brown. She had light browns and jet blacks, as well as a rich reddish brown that I was almost certain was specifically Hina’s and a strange, opalescent white that was definitely Alice’s, but nothing for me.

Amane and I were both frustrated by such a simple obstacle. My hair wasn’t outside the realm of types common in Japan; this actually made it worse, because at least if I was blond then it’d feel less absurd that Ms. Kamihata didn’t have a match. As it was, though, all she could do was shrug apologetically and offer me the next-closest match, which was the right curliness but in a jet-black like Amane’s, too dark for my head. It didn’t look right when she held up the swatch against hair. I would have gone for it anyway, just to alleviate the discomfort—but Amane waved her phone in my face. She had been waiting patiently for me to resolve my ridiculous issue before her own trim could begin.

Alice can help you.

“It’s fine, this works.”

She crossed her arms disapprovingly, flesh over carbon fiber.

“What? Nobody would know at a glance.”

She uncrossed her arms to type some more into the translation app.

Don’t cut corners.

She tapped her false-yet-indistinguishable eye for emphasis. I looked away, shamefaced. I was so used to just—bearing it, dealing with it, settling for “good enough.” That was why I was wearing a hoodie worth twenty quid and not eighty. Anything better made me feel guilty, even more of a burden, ever more indebted to their generosity.

You should go home and fix it with magic.

“No, it’s—it’s fine, I’ll deal.” When she looked at me blankly, I clarified, speaking louder and slower. “I’m okay. This is good enough.”

Amane replied to that with a tilt of her head and a deadpan glare. She understood me, alright, she just disagreed.

Talk to Alice.

“You mean a magical solution?” I lowered my voice, conscious of maintaining opsec—even though Ms. Kamihata was probably trustworthy if she had matching swatches of the Radiances’ hair, and she was the only other person in the room. Maybe it was policy to only have her in the shop when her special clients were in. “Like, sanguimancy? Regrow my hair with blood magic?”

Amane flicked my forehead with a carbon fiber finger. I flinched, out of surprise more than pain.

Alternatively, make a wig out of LM.

“Oh. That’s a thing? With magic?”

Amane full-on stared at me for a moment. I deserved it, really; even as the words left my mouth, I was already piecing together how such a thing could be accomplished. My habit of settling for less still tried to have the last word, though.

“But—I’m not sure this is worth interrupting her for. She was practically breathing fire when we left this morning.”

She’ll help, because she doesn’t want you to have ugly hair.

“And…what do I ask her? ‘Sorry, can you drop everything and help me throw away this perfectly fine haircut you told me to get?’”

Amane rolled her eyes.

I’ll text her. Go fix your hair, dude.

—

“Oh my God, yes, of course I’ll help.”

Alice and I stood where we had been standing three days ago, next to the spell circle with its halo of tentacle-arms in the basement, once again discussing body modification. This time, we were minus Ai; she was still working on the same aerospace project from before, and that work had taken her to JAXA headquarters elsewhere in the city. 

“Really? Nothing about how this is an irresponsible use of magic that will put Hikanome on my scent?” Or how I was wasting her time? She certainly seemed impatient, tapping away at the keyboard and monitor that controlled the assembly.

“Don’t be snippy at somebody trying to help you, Ezzen.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s hair. Hair is important,” she declared. “It defines how we look, you know, more than almost anything else.” I tried not to look at her tail when she said that. She ran a hand through her own hair, white and opalescent. “If I had known that Kamihata-san was going to do that to you…well, it’s nobody’s fault. If it’s anybody’s, it’s mine for not specifying to keep it long.”

“What do you mean?” It seemed unreasonable to blame herself, given that not even I had known how upsetting the short hairstyle would be for me. I began to run my hand through the short hair before jerking it away in discomfort. “Is it really that bad?”

“The haircut? It’s fine, it just doesn’t…suit you. We agree on that, I think.”

“…Yeah.” I scratched the base of my skull, once again uncomfortable with the lightness and the way it was exposed to the air currents. As always, magic was my distraction. “So, how’s this work?”

“Same way everything else works: LM. Get in the circle, would you?”

I hesitantly stepped closer to the glowing circle of green glyphs on the floor, remembering how Ebi had been wary of putting any part of her chassis inside. I glanced back at her.

“Should I be expecting…?”

“Analgomancy’s off, just step in.”

I did so, gingerly, and was relieved to experience no sudden, horrible transition between my prosthetic foot’s pain-nullifiers and those of the circle. I had a thought.

“Hey, why isn’t this a problem for my tattoo? Or Ai’s? Shouldn’t it damage the weave?”

“You’re fine. In, all the way in. Feet on the markers, stand up straight…straighter…good. You mean why Ebi can’t come in?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re hunching again. Up straight, c’mon…okay, stay there, don’t move.” Satisfied with my posture, she typed into the keyboard, and I heard something above me whirring. “The circle has a bunch of third-order components, some of them up to a meter ana of realspace. That’s also where Ebi keeps a lot of her auxiliary parts. Your spear is stored kata, isn’t it?”

I thought about it for a moment, resisting the urge to prod at my tattoo while Alice did whatever she was doing. The circle was even more complex than I had thought, then, if it had as many four-dimensional components as she was implying.

“Um, yeah, at least the original {COMPOSE} tuning I used was, but I actually don’t know whether Ai changed it. Must not have, if she didn’t see the need to warn me.”

“Stands to reason. Okay…done.”

“Done with what?”

“The scan. And now we apply the template, confirm, confirm, check the box, confirm…it’s going to need a few minutes to bake.”

A pop-up covered the terminal’s screen with an empty loading bar, an interface I recognized as belonging to a sibling program to GWalk.

“You’re making a glyph template.”

“Yes, so you can weave an LM version of a nice, full head of hair onto one of these.” She opened a drawer and pulled out a strip of fabric. “Wig base. We used to make these for Amane.”

“When she was regrowing her hair after…”

“Yes. I assume she told you.”

“She did.” To fill the silence that followed, I gestured for the cap, and she tossed it across the circle to me. I held it up, trying to figure out the orientation. “Are…I don’t know how wigs work,” I admitted. “Will I have to shave what I’ve already got?”

The prospect made me faintly nauseous. Bald Ezzen was—no, just no. Thankfully, Alice shook her head.

“No. Even a non-magical wig can get away with having a lot of hair underneath, and these caps include more than enough space-folding for what you’ve got. So you can just put it right on.”

I released a sigh I hadn’t known I was holding.

“Thanks. I…sort of thought you’d be mad at me.”

“For wanting long hair? Never.”

“Well—like, I thought—” I blushed, embarrassed at how I had been catastrophizing this conversation—then I realized why I had assumed we’d be doing this with blood magic. “Wait. I talked to Sky—Jason—first, and he made it sound like I was going to have to grow it back with sanguimancy. He said he’d done it before.”

Alice’s tail stopped moving, and she turned to me fully, reaching for the swiveling office chair and sitting sideways on it.

“He did. But there was no reason to do that here, yeah?”

“I…suppose not? This works. But he…” I dug out my phone, rereading the messages. “Definitely seemed pretty set on the solution being blood magic, not an LM wig.”

Silence as the loading bar on the screen crept forward. Alice looked up at the nest of soft-robotic tentacles stowed above me, and I hastily stepped out from beneath them and out of the circle. I was sure those had a gentler touch than I was envisioning, but I still wasn’t comfortable standing beneath them longer than necessary. Alice sighed.

“He thinks like Hina,” she sighed. “Why build a perfect fake when you can bleed for the real thing and hurt like hell while doing so?”

“Oh. Okay, yeah, fair. And this is a perfect fake?”

She gestured at the interface, where the progress bar had reached the two-thirds mark. “You tell me, self-made glyph genius.”

“You tell me, self-made LM expert,” I shot back with a smile, but I was already stepping toward the keyboard to click past the progress bar and look at the glyph diagram the program had generated. It had a number of telltale connections that you generally only saw in software-optimized designs, things that made it harder for most people to read but performed better. “Ai’s programming?”

“Yep.”

The diagram itself confirmed that the hair was generated using exact structural copies of the scan she’d just made of my hair. There were a number of sliders for different variables like hair thickness and length; currently greyed-out and unalterable while the current operation was in progress. The program was trying to calculate a template for the glyphs that would be 3D printed so I could easily follow it to weave the lattice.

“So this is how the mantles are made? Scan your body, tell the program to make the chains for an LM duplicate, then add on top of it for whatever features you want?”

“Yep. So all the design is in the diagrams, then we just print a template substrate and weave from that. Obviously that basic stuff isn’t Ai’s custom work, it’s the same full-stack that even a stock install of GWalk could…hm. I guess you’ve never done glyphcraft for production, have you?”

“No? I suppose not. Ai—” I stumbled on the homophonic name. “Ms. Ai—” No, that wasn’t better. What was her last name? I was embarrassed I couldn’t remember. “Ai-san had me manually editing the lattices for Amethyst’s prostheses.”

Alice covered a snort, betrayed by a twitch of her tail. “Drop the honorific, I know who you mean.”

“Sorry,” I replied, resenting the blush creeping up my neck.

“We don’t usually edit manually like that. What I was getting to was that Ai has automated away a lot of that, at least for the specialized tasks of mantles and prostheses. As a bespoke glyph craftsperson, I assume you object?”

“To programmatic glyph generation?” I scoffed. “As if. I love seeing what insane hacks the computer tries to do. It’s good stuff. Clever, inspirational. Especially when I know somebody as smart as her is behind it. There’s a lot of templating, right? Some of the motive and projection chains are pretty similar across all your diagrams.”

She nodded, checking her phone, idly typing on it even as she sat with me. I felt bad for wasting her time, but I was also really enjoying this conversation. “Our versioning’s gone to crap, a little, if you look closely. Nobody’s got exactly the same thing. But yes, being able to design one flight unit or what-have-you and then put it on all the mantles is convenient.”

“More convenient than altering your actual bodies, I’d wager.”

I realized as the words left my mouth that this was bringing us back to a sensitive topic.

“I mean…” she shrugged. “Design flexibility is the main thing, don’t get me wrong. But yes, the rest of us felt that this was much more true to the mahou shoujo transformation sequence than…bloody apotheosis.” In her London accent, it was unclear whether “bloody” was intended as a swear or in a more literal sense; probably both. “That went double after we got Amane back.”

“Apotheosis.” I rolled the word around my mouth. People sometimes used it for the Vaetna; I wondered if Alice was intentionally likening Hina to them. The hyena clearly liked to do so herself, but I wasn’t sure if that was just to push my buttons specifically. I decided to cut off this line of conversation before I managed to blurt something that would betray my incriminating desire to experience more of what Hina had shown me. “We’re, um, talking about a lot of classified stuff.”

“We are. Don’t worry; this room is off-limits to everyone but us, you know.”

“Is it? I’ve just been…coming and going as I pleased,” I admitted.

“Well, Ebi manages security and surveillance. Don’t need a keycard or anything when she knows it’s us.”

“I…see.” I supposed that was sensible, since she never left the building. I’d been a little worried when Amane and I had set out without her.

The progress bar popped back up to declare its completion, blocking me off from exploring more of the diagram.

“Done.” I squinted at the dialog box, but it was all in Japanese. “Was that the optimization step?”

“No, that was the printing.”

“Already?”

“Right? Ai never shuts up about the new printers. Come see for yourself.”

—

The glyph substrate was more complex in form than merely an outline of the sequence of glyphs. It followed the same path I’d ultimately pull the thread through, but the cross-section was more like a channel, a groove inset into the plastic to guide my hand through the various maneuvers. It also featured many more twists and turns than the glyphs themselves did, curves and edges where you could pull the thread taut so proper tension could be applied at the appropriate points. The resulting shape was a self-intersecting, coiled mess of dark polymer maybe forty centimeters in overall length but many times that if you were to stretch it all out end-to-end.

Because the LM was to be affixed to the wig cap, there was also a curved fixture for that, where it was held taut and in place by some clever grabbers. Even those bits were all the same part; like with my chopsticks, it seemed Ai had a soft spot for compliant mechanisms in her designs. Between those features and the overall shape, the substrate would be a nightmare to machine out of metal; even the monstrous, cutting-edge assembly in the workshop with its space-defying mechanisms would struggle, at least printed at this scale.

Alice had to leave me for more pressing obligations as soon as we’d freed the substrate from its embryonic bath of polymer goop and she’d shown me how to fix the cap in place, which left me a little nervous to do the weaving by myself. Each little loop was only barely large enough for me to keep track of the glowing thread as I pulled it through the groove, back and forth and around and over—word after word of the spell, for those inclined to think of it as such, although the translation for a chain of glyphs never sounded remotely grammatical in any language.

It turned out I had nothing to fear—the substrate made it dead simple to weave the design, even for an embarrassingly sloppy novice like me. Not all LM lattices are activatable and deactivatable, and this one was of the always-on variety, so it began to stitch in and grow the hair even as I was weaving. It was sort of unsettling to watch the matter manifest out of nothing, especially something as fine as human hair. The satisfaction of performing real magic outweighed the ick factor, though, and I was sad to see the process come to an end.

I was left staring down a full head’s worth of luscious, dark, shiny hair—my hair—hanging off the end of the twisting substrate. It was like the demented funhouse mirror of a mop, or the rebellious goth spawn of a Cambrian cephalopod and a curly straw. I disabused myself of the similes by removing the wig from its holder and trying to figure out which way was forward—I got there eventually. I ran my fingers through the hair and took a deep breath. My tattoo itched slightly.

“Again, not a problem you can solve, buddy.”

Just trying to help, I imagined my spear’s reply.

Before I could procrastinate any longer, I pulled the wig over my head. As promised, my existing hair was magically folded in under the cap, effectively removed from this slice of reality, hidden around a corner that shouldn’t exist—a process which would have thoroughly killed me if applied to the grey matter on just the other side of my skull. The wig sealed over my scalp, and for a moment I had a very strange feeling of disorientation and panic at the thing stuck on my head, get it off get it OFF—

And then I was fine. Better than fine, even, as I felt the weight on my neck and shoulders down to where the hair draped halfway down my back; not quite as unbroken and smooth of a glossy sable curtain as Amane’s hair, nor as long, but better nonetheless. I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.

Ezzen Colliot: All good now.

Amane Ishikawa: ദ്ദി´ ˘ `)✧

—

Trouble arrived in paradise that evening.

Amane had gushed about my new hair on her return, her joy evident as she circled me and ran her hands through it even though I couldn’t understand a word. She showed me how to put it up in a ponytail and did the same with her own hair, which had only received a minor trim, then went off with Ebi for whatever medical procedures filled their time behind closed doors—I tried very hard to ignore the easy innuendo there. Amane’s condition was serious.

Jokes in poor taste aside, the rest of that afternoon was spent on final prep for tomorrow’s big day. Alice eventually freed herself from meetings and gave my new hair—as I was thinking of it, rather than as a wig—the go-ahead. Hina was still absent without leave, which had me a little upset but not particularly worried for her; I was much more upset that Yuuka had deigned to grace us with her presence for dinner. It was one particular remark that set everything in motion.

“Doesn’t match the stubble, mate.”

The air on Alice’s side of the table heated up so quickly I didn’t have time to process the comment. I just flinched and scooted backward.

“Yuuka, we need to talk. Right now.”

“I meant he should grow out the beard! Have you seen Keanu? Beards with long hair are really in, and I think Ezza’s bone structure could totally—”

She shut up as a shadow fell over the table. Amane had been munching quietly—now she was a silent purple monolith, with one enormous hand gently cradling Yuuka’s cranium. She rumbled something at Yuuka, who flinched, looked confused, glanced at me, then at Alice, then back at me, and finally looked even more confused.

“I was trying to help!”

There was a flurry of Japanese back-and-forth between the three until she fell silent sullenly. I began to grow uncomfortable as an expectant silence took over the table, until finally—

“Sorry, Ezzen,” she blurted. Amethyst’s hand retracted, and she turned back into a girl, looking satisfied.

“Um. Forgiven?” I wasn’t even sure what had just happened, only that I’d never seen Yuuka look that contrite before in the short time I’d known her. She batted her temple with the heel of her hand, as though trying to dislodge something in her head. Troubleshooting her eye? Alice, for her part, still looked only marginally short of ready to skin Yuuka alive. At least the heat had died down, saving my poor pad thai.

At last, what she’d actually said caught up to me, and I reflexively reached up to brush my stubble. At some level, I’d recognized the need for a shave before the event, one to match my haircut, but since that had been thoroughly derailed by the circus with the extensions and the wig, I hadn’t—I didn’t like its texture under my fingers. I jerked my hand away and refocused on Yuuka, genuinely curious.

“You think I could…rock a beard? As it were?”

She didn’t respond until she’d made some sort of meaningful eye contact with Alice.

“With another…two or three weeks of growth? Yeah, I think so. Not like that, though. Should probably shave it.”

“Your foresight telling you that?”

“I don’t know what it’s been telling me, lately,” she groused, tapping her temple again. “Been a little on the fritz all week. Feel—” she glanced at Alice again, who was finally sitting back down, “feel like I should tell ya that, since you’re stickin’ around.”

—

That bizarrely non-confrontational encounter left me feeling a bit more cautiously positive about Saturday—but much worse about my appearance. I excused myself from dinner quickly and almost ran up the stairs, fast as my foot would allow, to shave off my stubble with the razor Alice had lent me. Now that I was aware of it, it felt almost…sticky, like a coating over my face and throat, nearly as intrusive as the wig had been in the first moments after putting it on. I ran the razor across my face, scrubbed off, and touched the skin again. Not smooth. 

I tried again, finding a few spots I had missed the first time in the crevasses where my neck met the corners of my jaw. Rinsed off again—still not smooth. The mirror claimed it was a clean shave at a distance, but up close, I could still clearly see the microdots of each follicle for the thick hairs of my beard. Maybe it was the razor: a dull blade or just the wrong type for this. Either way, I’d already imposed so much on the girls for my hair-related woes today, I couldn’t bring myself to ask if they had any others that might do a better job.

Dissatisfied with the shave, I tried to lose myself in random videos about magic and the Spire, old favorites and new releases I’d missed in all my newfound excitement. Once I’d handed over my answers to Overload’s questions, he’d finalized the video shockingly quickly, though there was precious little information about my flamefall that was new to me anymore. I still wondered where Holton was, who’d bailed him out—but whenever my thoughts strayed too far, my fingers would find my chin, and the tight dissatisfaction in my chest would return.

It got worse the later the night dragged on. Conscious of the fact that I’d have to be up early tomorrow—or at least early by my standards, out of bed by 8 AM—I tossed and turned in bed, still seeking refuge in distraction but unable to find it for long. I’d taken the wig off when I went to bed, nervous of some vague and ridiculous death by hair-strangulation in the night, but that just made the discomfort more gnawing, so I quickly re-donned the almost-real hair and occupied my hands by running my fingers through it instead. That helped, a bit, but still no sleep.

At half past two, I decided something had to be done.

—

Lighthouse Tower was different at night. The penthouse was still navigable, thanks to a mix of the city lights through the floor-to-ceiling windows and the main lights over the kitchen island, which remained on but dim. Familiar furniture was recast as alien, tenebrous shapes in my peripheral vision, a shadowy version of the space I’d just begun to call home. These failed to spook me as I crept my way down the stairs to the elevator. For all that the list of my various hangups and phobias was ever-expanding and had several recent additions, the dark didn’t make the cut. It would have been cozy, even tranquil—I was entirely too uncomfortable with the sensation on my chin and throat to relax. I hit the button and waited impatiently.

I knew from experience that there was an annoying chime to mark the elevator’s arrival at the upper, but not lower, of the penthouse’s two floors. The lower one had probably been disabled precisely for late-night comings-and-goings like mine. Why not the upper as well, I had no idea.

From there, it was a straight descent to B1F, where the lights remained on even at this late hour. I shouldn’t have been surprised by that, given Ai’s propensity to pull late nights, but I hadn’t really thought it through until now. I felt out of place walking down these halls in my nightclothes—just a T-shirt and shorts, hardly an incriminating onesie, and there was nobody around to pass judgment anyway, but still. The narrow windows on the various closed doors to the workshop showed the vast ex-garage illuminated but motionless, the huge industrial machines powered down for the night. I didn’t want to linger; my actual destination was just across the hall.

The prosthetic fitting room with the spell circle was also closed for the night. Like the workshop, I could see its lights were still on through the sole window in the metal door. I bit my lip, debating whether it was even necessary to be here—but what I was planning to do would hurt, and hopefully sixty more meters of distance would limit how much red ripple would reach Amane. I felt safer hiding my crimes down here in this basement, assuming I could get in. Fretting that I was about to set off some sort of alarm, I tested the unassuming handle—nope. No blaring klaxons, which was good, but definitely locked up. I wondered how to bypass it with magic—

“Evening.”

I yelped and twisted away from the door, nearly overbalancing before my stabilizer kicked in and my prosthetic foot came down behind me. I held Ebi at spear-point. She was wearing…an actual polka-dotted nightgown, right out of a movie, nightcap and all. She yawned with her digital face and stretched sleepily, exaggerating the motions of her neck and shoulders to a degree that straddled the line between cartoonish and grotesque, then abandoned the act and crossed her arms.

“I said, evening.”

I sighed, banishing my spear and testing the handle once more for good measure. “Evening. Given you found me and haven’t raised an alarm, I assume you already have an inkling of what I’m up to at this hour. Accomplice or snitch?”

“Still deciding. Spell it out for me.”

I rubbed my jaw, wincing and impatient. It occurred to me that of everyone in the Radiances’ weird pseudo-family, Ebi might be the most sympathetic to this particular goal. She’d expressed her disdain for hair in all its forms before; it really came down to how much of a prick she felt like being. “Stubble. I want it gone.”

“Big oof. Totally get where you’re coming from. And you were gonna do blood magic about it?”

“Can we call it biomancy?”

“It’s meat.” She made a show of glancing through the small window. “Figure anybody’s in there?”

“Are you going to help me or not? I know you can unlock this door.”

“You were just debating semantics; can’t be in that much of a hurry. Y’know, we have sub-basements below this one, if you wanted to get further from the girls.”

“Do they have configurable analgomatic spell circles?” I’d take that option if there wasn’t some weird catch.

“No.”

There it was.

“Then I’m not interested. Let me in.”

She tutted. “That’s no way to talk to your doctor.”

“Let me in, please.”

“With feeling.”

“What’s the point of this, Ebi?”

“The point is that you do not fuck around with blood magic.” Something in the robot’s voice changed. Not the sonic, autotuned quality, something deeper, like the feeling in your sinuses before a storm. “Do you know exactly what you’re doing? Do you? Or are you playing with forces you don’t understand for vanity?”

“Vanity? I can’t sleep,” I shot back, trying and failing to keep my voice down. “Because of this. There’s something wrong with me, and I’m trying to fix it. Help me.”

“Quiet. You’re meat. You’re fragile. You’re not going to fix anything fucking about in the dark.” Her voice was icy. “Not when you’re so easy to break by accident.”

The door clicked. Ebi’s digital face twisted into a grin.

“Would be cool to see you try, though. Just one problem.”

My heart thudded. “Yeah?”

“Take a look. And really, be quiet. The soundproofing turns off when the door is open.”

I very gently tested the handle once more, slowly pushing the door inward. I looked through the crack and saw Ai, head down on the desk, surrounded by paper. Spent energy drinks were neatly stacked on the corner of the desk. Somebody—Ebi—had put a blanket over her.

I dropped my voice to a whisper, and gently closed the door, looking back at Ebi. “Ah.”

“Yeah. Be glad you didn’t come down sixteen minutes sooner.”

“What do I do?” My determination was starting to curdle into anxiety. “I can’t do this with her right there.”

“Maybe that’s a sign you shouldn’t do it at all. I don’t want to wake her up either, for what it’s worth. This is the first real sleep she’s gotten in…” the robot mimed checking a wristwatch, “sixty-one hours. She hides it well, but I’m not letting anything wake her up until she’s gotten a nice, full nine hours.”

“We have to be out the door in…” I thought for a moment, not equipped with the same precision timekeeping. “Eight!”

“Sucks for Hikanome. She’ll still make the reception dinner, I think. But yeah, if you want to use the circle, we’re going to have to be real quiet. So I guess it bears asking: does it have to be blood magic?”

“Well…” To deal with the stubble, probably not. But Sky had planted an idea in my head, given me a stone that I was aiming at a second bird. “Yes. It does. And it’s not for vanity.”

“I know. Was just making sure you knew that.” She put a hand on the doorknob. “Ready?”

“I guess. Couldn’t you just, er, dose her? Give her something to make sure she gets her full night’s sleep even with us crashing around?”

“If I had something like that on-hand, I’d just have jabbed you in the neck before you noticed me.”

I shuddered. “…Right. In that case…”

—

The preparation was easy enough. Scrawl the most basic soundproofing glyph chain on a piece of paper, wince as I wove it shoddily, place the resulting lattice near Ai’s head. It was a poor solution even before my own sloppy implementation, but it was the least we could do, and it meant I didn’t have to literally be on my tiptoes. Still, just to be safe, Ebi and I were conversing by instant message even though we were standing right next to each other—me in the circle, her a safe way outside at the control panel. I’d had the good sense to take the heavy stabilizer module out of my pocket and place it outside the circle—I didn’t want to bring it in and ruin it or the circle or both.

ebi-furai: okay, how do you want it?

I waved in her general direction.

ezzen: Whatever the regular analgomantic configuration is, I guess?

ebi-furai: sure thing

She held up three fingers, more slender and angular than a human’s.

ebi-furai: counting you in for changeover

ebi-furai: 3

ebi-furai: 2

Wait. I had forgotten about that part.

ebi-furai: 1

“Fuck!” I covered my mouth to strangle the yelp as the low-power painkiller effect vanished from my prosthetic foot and I felt the full force of my still-healing amputation and burn. The pain had been steadily going down, but cutting off the analgesic effect cold turkey was still a shock to the system. Ebi glared at my outburst.

ebi-furai: cmon, man

Still, the moment was brief as could be, and then the circle’s full analgomancy kicked in, the relevant glyphs around the perimeter luminescing green.

ezzen: Uh.

ezzen: It occurs to me that this is Ai’s weave, isn’t it?

ezzen: This won’t wake her up or something?

ebi-furai: no backlash because shes actually good at her job

Alright, damn. I rolled my eyes at her petulantly as I sat slowly in the middle of the circle, glad to have confirmation that the painkiller magic was doing its job. It didn’t do much for the discomfort of sitting on the floor, though. I supposed that normally there would be some kind of seat or bed, like how Ebi had rolled my whole medical bed in the first time I’d been in here; as it was, only hard floor for me. I wasn’t actually sure what the floor material was, but it was tough and smooth. At this closer-to-the-ground inspection, there was a faint but definite slope to the floor, leading to—

A drain in the corner, outside the circle. For blood, one had to assume, although it looked like it was kept clean and sanitary. I hoped what I was about to do wouldn’t literally live up to the name, but I appreciated the thought given to ease of cleanup just in case. I’d probably ruined the backseat of that cab.

ebi-furai: oh. theres some fine print you might be interested in

ebi-furai: the red-dampening mode we have on right now is really fragile to green

I glanced down at the illuminated glyphs on the floor, eyes tracing around the circle, and I realized the problem. The painkilling effect basically took the red ripple produced in the circle and dissipated it as heat—but if fed green ripple, the mutagenic frequency I expected my Flame would radiate alongside the red, things could get chaotic. It was hard to say without GWalk in front of me, but it could easily spit out enough kinetic blue to shake the whole building; was that what had happened my first night here? Worse, it could burn out the lattice, and then anything could happen. I could turn to glass.

ezzen: Shit.

ezzen: Is there a mode that doesn’t do that?

I already knew the answer as I looked around the circle. There were only so many configurations of the glyphs available, and it was hard for most of what was available to tolerate both red and green. Ripple color didn’t exactly follow color theory, but by lucky coincidence, those two colors often paired off.

ebi-furai: theres a low power high stability mode for, as amethyst puts it, bad weather

ebi-furai: gonna be another changeover. want something to bite down on?

ezzen: Fucking hell.

ezzen: Yeah, I guess.

Ebi pulled off her nightcap and tossed it to me. I twisted it, shoved it in my mouth, and bit down. She held up three fingers again, and I nodded in reply.

ebi-furai: 3

ebi-furai: 2

ebi-furai: 1

The circle switched modes. Some glyphs flickered off while others flickered on, and—I groaned into the gag—a loud clunk noise.

“Mh?”

Ebi and I both went very still as Ai shifted in her sleep. Compared to the other mode, I did not appreciate at all how little pain this was killing. It would still protect Amane sleeping up above, but this was now going to hurt. A lot.

ebi-furai: thats all i can do from here i think

ebi-furai: youre up

ebi-furai: no, wait, hold on

She pulled something out of her pocketspace and tossed it to me. I caught it hastily, frowning at how it could have gone clattering across the floor, then figured out how to unfold it.

ezzen: Makeup mirror?

ebi-furai: so you can see what youre doing

ebi-furai: NOW thats all i can do

She accompanied that by replacing her face with a big thumbs-up emoji. I took a deep breath around the gag. Now or never—and with the limited painkilling effect, I was starting to think never sounded pretty nice. There were ways this could go very wrong magically, not to mention waking Ai up and getting caught—ruining her sleep in the process—and even in the best-case scenario, I was going to have a pretty bad time.

But the discomfort on my throat was somehow worse than that; a sufficiently sharp razor or even an epilator wasn’t enough. I wanted to attack the problem at the source, make more of myself, like Hina had said. Sky had seemed confident suggesting this, although I wasn’t sure if it was what he had in mind. And I figured that, at least in this small way, I would become a little more like the Vaetna—smooth—my own tiny apotheosis through magic. Not hurting anybody else.

I met Ebi’s eyes one last time, then focused on the little mirror, on the rough patches on my face. I reached for my Flame, and it was there, waiting. I told it I wanted the hair gone, picturing it, trying to will it into happening through sheer want rather than glyphs. Specifically the hair from my philtrum downward, I told it, not my eyelashes or brows or the tiny hairs in my ears and nose. Those were important, but my beard was just a nuisance.

I connected that to the idea of wanting the long hair that had been taken from me. I wanted the LM wig to become real, for that hair to become my own, for there to be no need for the wig. I deserved to be whole, as I saw it.

Maybe it was vanity, just a little.

My Flame understood, in its primitive, emotional way. It surged through me, icy and ablaze, up from my chest and through my throat like acid reflux from hell, seeping out through my veins into every pore, every follicle. It rushed and destroyed and combined and—it kept going, down and down and out and through and all around me, everywhere philtrum-down, arms and chest and legs and I was burning and burning and screaming into the gag all the while—

Blood oozed from my arms, legs, chest, belly, back, neck—all flowing down the gentle slope into the drain. Every follicle had been torn open, the very machinery of my cells removed. My heart was pounding so hard it felt like it was trying to escape my chest, each thud bringing another wave of oozing pain across my body. I was practically a fountain of blood—

Then fire, once more. Searing micro–cauterizations prickled across my body to seal every rupture in my flesh—not literal cauterization, as I’d find later, but we were past the limits of what my fragile nerves were designed to experience. Rather, new flesh grew where old had been removed, tiny polyps to plug the gaps. Some small pity so I wouldn’t have to do it myself once more.

As the Flame ebbed away, its work done, I slumped sideways. Everything fell into darkness—well, almost everything. Between the pain a tiny spark of annoyance bubbled up from somewhere inside me, at what I saw between the splatters of blood on the little hand mirror.

Had it made me blond?

—

My reflection in the limo’s tinted window said not quite blond. My new hair was more of an ochre; ginger but in the sense of the vegetable. The Flame’s hilarious punchline after it had upcharged me by taking all my body hair. In between Alice’s fretting over the ramifications of this decision, Amane had asked whether the new hair was LM incorporated from the wig, which had possibly merged with or replaced my scalp. It certainly hurt like it did, but we hadn’t had the time to check. It was still doing better than most of my body.

Every inch of my skin from the neck down hurt, red and irritated and so terribly dry. It wasn’t completely smooth; each torn-out follicle had left a tiny goosebump where the Flame had sealed the hole, so miniscule it was invisible even at close inspection and only faintly detectable by touch. It stung everywhere my clothes touched my skin, especially around the waistband of my pants, and that was after Ebi had loaded me up on a truly frightening amount of painkillers. Part of Clipboard’s job was to make sure I took more in a few hours. 

I’d put the clothes on nonetheless and gotten in the limo, a smile on my face despite knowing the cold and dry February air would make the pain worse. Everything hurt, I had a full head of truly odd-colored and likely magical hair, and my skin was not perfectly smooth as I had willed it to be, but it was worth it. The gnawing incorrectness on my skin had been rinsed off by blood and scoured away by flame. The long hair on my back and shoulders felt right, even if I had some serious questions about the Flame’s choices in color coordination. I’d insisted to the girls that I hadn’t picked that part. Maybe I’d dye it back.

Did any of this make me more ready to face Hikanome?

Absolutely not.

Still worth it, though.

---

Author’s Note:

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This one was a lot of fun to write. Next week we get started with Hikanome. We’ll also probably get the new cover! Stay tuned!

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December 27, 2024

CONTENT WARNINGS

Intense dysphoria

“I’m—mutating? Like Hina?” Yes, Ezzen, that’s what she just said, don’t ask stupid questions. I tried for something more cogent. “Related to what I did with the punch, I assume?”

Ai nodded, prodding the hologram of my arm. She had highlighted the tricep, deltoid and pectoral—the punching muscles.

“Maybe four percent higher muscle density.”

The electric excitement deflated slightly. Four percent didn’t sound all that significant, not enough to warrant the giddiness or the quiet horror.

“Density, not mass? Er, you know what I mean by that…obviously, higher density would also increase the mass. What I mean is that it’d look the same from the outside, yeah? Like how Hina doesn’t look strong at all.” I eyed Ai’s biceps, still bare from when we’d sparred. She was muscular and made it look good; honest gains from honest exercise, not Hina’s brand of magical transcendence which left her looking slender and petite until she pulled her shirt off and revealed how heart-flutteringly toned she was, the steely muscle under her soft skin.

“Yes. For contrast, she is closer to three hundred percent, and the way her muscles anchor is different from ours. I would assume you will also probably have changes in the bone, but nothing external.”

For some reason, I was relieved that I wouldn’t become any bulkier. Four percent more mass wouldn’t have turned me into a hypertrophic roid-monster anyway, and arguably would have pushed me into a more conventionally attractive zone of built-ness than where I was now, but wider shoulders would just mean more to hide under a hoodie. I realized my sleeve was still rolled up from when Ai had scanned me and hastily pulled it back down. No shade on Ai’s physique; I just found it uncomfortable to imagine myself looking more like her.

“Cool, cool, that’s—good. And, um, spitballing here—it’ll only continue if I put more magic into it? Keep aggravating the Flame? Like with Opal’s tail.”

Ai’s expression darkened. “That’s right. But it’s important to understand that, like her tail, this is not a controlled process.” She half-turned to pull up her top slightly and point at where it exposed her tattoo on her lower back. “This is calibrated. It’s enhancement, but also shock absorption and safety limits. Right now, your only mutations are only in your arm, so…let’s say it progresses to fifty percent higher density. Your arm would be much stronger, but the rest of your chest muscles and joints will still be regular strength. You could hurt yourself badly. Hina-san has changed enough now that she can take it, but for years, she just…”

“Let herself get hurt.” I sighed. “We talked about that. Well, not the history, but that attitude.”

“Yes. It’s horrifying.”

An awkward silence stretched between us.

“She’s not a bad person, Ai.”

Ai shook her head, deactivating the hologram and flopping into the chair at her desk.

“You have a bias.”

“I—sure, I guess I do. But the way she described it, she’s not being cruel. That’s your hangup, isn’t it?”

“It was yours, too, until a few days ago.” She spun the chair lazily, looking up at the assemblage of robotic tentacles over the bed. “I thought you understood why.”

“I do,” I protested. “She did make me uncomfortable with all the…masochistic moaning from having her bones broken. But that’s not externalized cruelty. I didn’t even harm my Flame for this.” I held up my arm. It felt basically the same; maybe a bit of an ache, but neither damaged nor noticeably stronger.

“You will, if she wants you to. Now that you’ve had a taste.”

“No, I won’t. She offered, after you left, and I pushed her away. Specifically because we had promised you, mind, and I didn’t want to betray that. Why are you treating this like such a slippery slope? Alice and Heliotrope have been doing that too.”

“Because that’s what happened with Jason. Her ex-boyfriend.”

“Sky? He got way too into the pain stuff?”

“He wanted power, she gave it to him.”

“Less cryptically?”

Ai sat back in her chair, counting on her fingers.

“More muscle, new senses, he got taller, hair in different places…”

“New senses. Like Heliotrope’s eye?”

And hair? That felt…mundane, but the rest was interesting. I pulled out my phone on reflex to ask him myself—was interrupted by a knock on the door and a shimmering white dome of hair peeking into the doorway.

“Ojamashimasu. There you are, Ezzen. I was wondering where you’d gone.”

“Oh. Hi, sorry.”

“No worries,” Alice hastily assured me, stepping in and closing the door behind her. “I’m glad to see you’re here with Ai. What’s all this? Door was ajar, so I assumed nothing too sensitive…”

I exchanged a nervous glance with Ai—I could see Alice getting mad if she learned what I had done with Hina. Given Ai’s own judgment toward Hina on the topic, would she even cover for me? Plus, Alice was also being transformed by her magic, which Amane had indicated was a less-than-euphoric process for the dragon-girl. I opted for a distraction, reaching over to the desk for my mikan. I lobbed it to her. Alice caught it and looked at me curiously.

“Thanks?”

“Not that hungry anyway.”

Alice shrugged and got to work puncturing the skin with her long nails. Ai looked at her own mikan, as though registering her own hunger, and hesitantly began to peel it, but Alice tapped her shoulder.

“Normally I’d be delighted to see you eating real food, but I had actually been intending to ask if you wanted dinner.”

Ai blinked, glanced at the clock, then scrambled out of her chair and toward the door. She yanked it open and started calling across the hall and into her workshop. Alice chuckled.

“Mm-hm.”

Ai turned back to us, signaled with her hands that she’d be right back, and slipped out the door.

“She showed me her tattoo,” I informed Alice. It wasn’t like me to start conversations like that, but I thought I remembered Alice telling me to ask about it at some point. If nothing else, it kept us off the topic of my arm. She swallowed a slice of fruit.

“What did you think?”

“It’s impressive. Um…really quiet for the output, and the ward integration is neat. I thought the kinetic dampening could use some work, but I’d need to look at the diagram; I’m not great at organics. Of course, that’d be different from how it’s done in the mantles, but the rest is fairly similar.”

“It’s different when it’s a basic human body being enhanced, isn’t it? More magical, I suppose.”

“Completely,” I agreed. “That was my first time seeing it in person, really, aside from a few times Hina’s been Hina, and it’s a lot more visceral in person. The gap is much more apparent, but there’s something more relatable in it, too, I think, kind of easier to self-insert into it and imagine what it’s like to move like that…” I trailed off. “Um. Hina was there, too.”

“Did she demonstrate?”

“Yeah.”

Alice shifted her weight, tail sliding on the tiled floor. I braced myself for more bile or judgment about Hina’s disposition, but Alice was smiling.

“She really loves the freedom of movement. That’s actually how we got to talking, back when we first met. We both loved how physical the action in a lot of the more modern mahou shoujo anime is.”

“Um. She really seems to love it,” I risked. This conversation could still blow up in my face, so I was trying to take it stage-wise before we got to the part where I had used my Flame.

Alice gave me a knowing look. “Gave you the parachute talk, did she?”

“That’s a specific thing?”

“She’s tried every metaphor there is. I still only half-get it, to be honest, but as long as she’s happy and not doing it on camera…”

Ai stepped back into the room, looking relieved.

“They just finished, no problems.”

“You don’t trust your best engineers?” Alice’s tone was dry.

“Of course I trust them, touzen. But we’re already behind, and…” Ai visibly shook off whatever grip the project had on her. “I said I was giving you this afternoon, Ezzen, and especially now that your arm is beginning to mutate, I want to make sure you have the support—”

Alice’s tail thudded heavily on the tile.

“It’s what?”

Ai re-activated the hologram in answer. “It’s very minor, low-red, just muscle density enhancements like we saw with Hina that summer. As mild as it gets.” Nervousness crept into her voice as the air temperature began to rise; Alice was gripping the mikan so hard it was leaking juice onto the tiles. “I didn’t expect Hina-san to provoke his Flame that quickly, I shouldn’t have let them spar. I’m sorry.” Ai bowed.

“They were sparring?”

“Hina was…being Hina,” I explained, guilty for having been baited in by my girlfriend’s antics no matter how authentic her neediness had been. “We—we stopped quickly.”

“Why did you bother at all? You don’t need combat training right now; you need public relations coaching and a haircut.” Alice pinched the bridge of her nose. “Ai, I thought you said you were going to brief him today? On the political situation?”

“I showed him mantle schematics and some of our interviews because—kanyuu no jouken dakara.” Ai glanced at me, wincing at her slip out of a language I spoke. “Ezzen agreed to stay because of his interest in our mantles, not for the politics.”

“We are on a time budget until Saturday. Until such a time as the PCTF stops hanging over our heads, politics are actually the highest priority.” She took a deep breath, stilling her tail. Her slitted pupils moved to me. “Not to say your comfort and interests don’t matter, Ezzen, it’s just—these mutations make the situation more complicated.”

“Um—fairly minor, isn’t it?”

“Not to everyone. On Saturday, Miyoko will see that, and she’ll make a big deal out of it and that will change the PR calculus for your whole presence at the event. It’s one thing to be a flametouched magical engineer, but mutagenic residuals elevate you further in Hikanome’s belief structure, even the smallest ones.”

I looked at Ai, wondering why she hadn’t mentioned this if it was such a big deal. Neither had Hina, but that seemed at least par for the course with her—the dour look that had taken over Ai’s face when Alice had mentioned Hikanome’s beliefs was the missing piece of the puzzle. She didn’t care about the cult’s peculiarities, if she bothered to know them at all.

“Takehara-san.” The Emerald Radiance looked and sounded tired. “Calm down. We knew Miyoko-san will care about his scars. I don’t think a few muscles being less than five percent more dense will change anything.”

Alice’s tail thumped.

“She will care, because it’s extra leverage.” The two Radiances glared at each other for a long moment, and Ai was the first to avert her eyes. Alice’s tail twitched. “Why are you even pushing back on me about this? We both know this is Hina’s fuckup for doing that to him. You ought to be angry, too.”

Ai’s eyes flashed.

“I am angry, but I am trying to direct it somewhere useful.” She looked at me. “Ezzen already knows to stop the mutations. No more channeling emotion with glyphless Flame.”

I blinked. “Um, yeah, I already had a bit of a fight with Hina about it.”

Of course, that wasn’t the whole truth; she’d actually talked me around on the appeal, and it was really only her behavior that we’d clashed on. But I didn’t want to piss off either of them further right now, so I was more than happy to kick that can down the road.

Alice sighed in relief. “Okay, that’s—better than nothing, I suppose. Then—shit, this is just a wake-up call, really. We’ve been slacking on prep to begin with; it’s already Tuesday, and we haven’t even briefed you on manners, let alone the talk track or—God damn it,” she fumed. “Three more days sounds like a lot, but it’s not.”

I swallowed. Alice seemed unable to fully smother her anxieties, and they were fanning the flames of my own. I felt unaccountably guilty for mostly lazing around and snuggling with Hina since our interference in the Thunder Horse Inferno; logically, I knew that it was Todai’s job to prepare me, but I still felt like I’d somehow been procrastinating. And it didn’t help that my girlfriend seemed to be persona non grata, even if her teammates were gracious enough to not extend that to me by association. I took a deep breath.

“Um, okay. I’m with Ai, for whatever it counts: solutions first, yeah? What do I need to do in the next three days?”

—

Two days later, I was now seriously regretting that question.

First, they’d given me homework. Todai’s PR department had scraped together a list of YouTube videos covering both basic Japanese formal etiquette for foreigners and some more specific information on Hikanome’s particular practices and beliefs—the latter including, ironically, a video co-authored by Star. Watching those had taken me deep into the night; it should have only taken an hour and a half, or half that at 2x speed, but I kept getting distracted.

The rain had returned, and I found myself missing the warmth of Hina’s body against mine. My bed was just too big for one person. I at least had enough experience with ennui to recognize that a hot shower would help, but it was still rather lonely. I kept glancing at the balcony, hoping to see her tapping on the glass, or catch a hint of purest blue. No such luck.

I entertained the idea of talking to Sky, asking about the kinds of mutations Hina had given him—or he had given himself—but there were two problems. First, I knew I didn’t need the temptation; that was also why I told myself that Hina’s absence was for the best. Second, now that it was apparently connected to the Hikanome event, poking Sky about it almost felt like work. So I avoided it and fell into a dreamless sleep.

Yesterday had begun with me being woken up too soon given my 2 AM bedtime. My mission: hands-on practice of what the videos had covered. This had taken the form of a deeply embarrassing series of repeat-after-me’s with Alice until she’d had to rush off to other duties—including more yelling at Hina, I’d find out later—leaving me to continue with one of her bilingual subordinates whose name I instantly forgot. Slowly and excruciatingly, I achieved passable delivery of basic greetings and simple phrases which would mildly impress the average Hikanome member and give the impression I really was intending to stick around long-term.

The good news was that I wasn’t expected to do almost any of the talking, not with three of the Radiances at hand to field questions.

“In fact,” Amane had explained via Ebi at lunch, “the less you talk, the less chance you have of leaking something extremely confidential. It’s not that we don’t trust you, but many of Hikanome’s higher-level people, and especially the flamebearers, will be trying to extract useful information from you, and if you don’t mind me saying so, it’s pretty obvious you don’t have the experience or skills to gracefully deflect away from sensitive topics in that kind of social piranha tank.”

“I—yeah,” I sighed. “I don’t.” It stung to admit that I didn’t have a public face befitting a VNT; I’d always envisioned a Vaetna version of myself as being outgoing and loquacious like Heung. I resolved to try to channel that energy in a less high-stakes setting than what we were doing on Saturday; there, I’d just be doing the social equivalent of huddling inside my shell. “Will you be mantled up the whole time?”

The black-haired girl shook her head. “Not in private. We’ll be having a flamebearer-only dinner, and I’ll be human for that.”

“Isn’t that the most dangerous time? Surrounded by other flamebearers?”

Amane shook her head stiffly as Ebi translated what I’d said.

“They’re not that hostile. The show of trust matters anyway, and Yuuka would stop any danger before it happens.”

Her level of trust in her former kidnappers amazed and baffled me, even with the security afforded by precognition, but it wasn’t my place to prod further. I just nodded and kept working through my katsu sandwich. Ebi had me eating a lot, both because my foot was still healing and because it would take my arm another day or two to fully integrate the mutations, and that was apparently calorically-intensive. At least the food was good—but it was takeout, not home-cooked. I’d still seen neither hide nor hair of Hina since she’d vanished on me.

Yesterday afternoon had been a lesson on what the Radiances called “opsec,” the control of sensitive information. Overload had mentioned in the chatroom that I would be answering some questions for his next video, which Ebi had seen, and so I had wound up with Ai, Amane, and Ebi all hanging over my shoulder as I drafted my responses to avoid any leakage.

Q: What was it like being flametouched?

A: Disorienting. I heard voices.

Even as I turned to give a tentative, questioning thumbs-up to the other girls, I realized my mistake. Ai was blinking at me. Ebi crossed her arms.

“Say what?”

“It…talked to me. When I was first flametouched.”

The three women shared an uneasy glance. Ebi tapped her chestplate.

“I’m the only talking Flame I’ve ever heard of, and I’m a really special case. This isn’t the kind of thing you just don’t mention.”

“It—I kind of forgot,” I muttered shamefully. “There was a lot going on at the time. And it hasn’t really…done anything since then.”

“What did it say?”

“Um—I don’t really remember what it said the first time. No, really, I don’t, it’s all kind of a…haze. The only other time was in…the car, right before I was rescued. It wanted me to trust it.”

A tingle ran down my spine as I recalled the firelight dancing in pitch darkness. I still didn’t understand what it had meant—was it trying to push me down the same path as Hina, seeking pain? But in that case, it felt odd that I hadn’t heard it when I had channeled it into my arm yesterday. And there had also been the time both Hina and I had heard it, when she’d cleared the patch of hair from my skin the other night—but I definitely couldn’t tell them that. It was deeply private, for one, but I also really didn’t need them more on my case about Hina-induced Flame misuse.

“Trust, huh. Just words? Not a vision?”

“No. Is that how it is for Heliotrope?”

Amane nodded. Instead of translating for her, Ebi let out an autotuned sigh.

“I can’t believe you’re only bringing that up now. It’s been, like, five days, and you didn’t tell us.”

Ai poked my bad arm gently. Perhaps it was my good arm now, in a sense.

“Better that he didn’t. If Hikanome found out, they’d be much more interested in you.”

I was confused. “Isn’t that what we want? I didn’t really get Alice’s problem.”

“It benefits us to a certain point,” Amane clarified via Ebi. “We want them to be interested enough to work with us, but not enough that they want to poach you. This would be too much, with the arm. They’d think you’re some kind of prophet.”

Prophet. An interesting word, considering Heliotrope’s eye. I didn’t really want to think about her, either, though.

“So…delete it?”

“Yes, delete it.” Ai had her phone out, taking notes. “I’d like to test you more, but…I honestly wouldn’t know where to start,” she admitted. “It’s probably related to all the other strange things with your Flame. The second contact, how it came through the camera. But I don’t know what to do with that information.” She frowned. “We don’t have time for a serious investigation right now, anyway.”

Of course, cutting that part left my answer too sparse, so we back-filled with talk of my elation, framing it as a dream come true, mostly leaving out the parts tinged with nightmare.

Q: How did you end up at Lighthouse?

“Oh, God.” This was the exact kind of question I had been most nervous about answering—not only because I wasn’t sure of the policy surrounding discussing the PCTF’s actions, but also because nobody had actually told me what had happened between me burying the car and Hina whisking me away. Somehow, in our murky night whisperings, I had never thought to ask. And now she wasn’t around to give the answer.

Todai was one step ahead, though. Ebi practically yanked the keyboard from my grip and wrote out a response.

A: My flamefall had badly injured me with residuals (mainly the injury to my foot) and with the Spire already scrambling to respond to the other fragments of my flamefall and the immediate aftermath, they were not in a position to accept me. Radiance Sapphire was local for an unrelated event, and was first on the scene, and she made the executive decision to bring me to Lighthouse instead where I could receive the best possible post-amputation care and prostheses.

“Is that really how it went down?”

“Well, we’re obviously trying to omit the part about you getting hurt trying to escape the PCTF, but yeah.” 

That made me angry. I understood the need for some level of secrecy and diplomacy, but—

“We really can’t even say that much? Why does everything they do stay rumor when there’s people like me and Amane as living proof? Why can’t we accuse them of their crimes?”

Amane sighed quietly. Ebi translated.

“First, they’d disavow the actual force who came after you as an independent third party unsanctioned by the PCTF. Plausible deniability. That’s why they kill the cameras. Then they’d declare an investigation, find that the kidnappers and all their materiel had mysteriously vanished, and that would be the end of it. Everybody knows what they do, but accusing them wouldn’t make them admit it.”

“Opal told me that telling Hikanome what they did to you would be our diplomatic trump card.”

“Alice is an idealist.” Amane shut her eyes and shifted in her seat, gripping the armrest with her prosthetic hand. “She’s talking about a world where, if the average Hikanome member could be persuaded to believe our claim, the church’s money and influence would be enough to hold the PCTF accountable. But it’s not.”

“Then…?”

“Violence is the only language monsters can understand.”

“You mean going to war with the PCTF?” My heart sank. “More of what we did to that oil rig? That’s not—”

“Stop,” Ai broke in. “This isn’t related to what we’re doing now. Regardless of our long-term plans, this particular statement accomplishes all we need it to. People can infer as much as they want, but if the PCTF takes issue with this, they would need to admit that they went after you in the first place. That’s the goal. It validates your presence here.”

“Okay,” I sighed. I had to admit these kinds of political moves weren’t my strong suit—hell, that was why the Radiances were helping me with this, why this paragraph had been decided on without my input. But as I reread what Ebi had written, a different gap began to grow: What about the Spire? By now, I had a pretty good picture of the various reasons Todai wanted me here, and obviously, it was still far better than ending up in the PCTF’s clutches, but why had the Vaetna allowed Hina to take me when I was unconscious? That wasn’t like them at all, not when I had obviously been on the way to the Gate. With three of them there, there should have been nothing in the world that could stop them from taking me off her hands—taking me where I belonged.

Something was still missing. I thought about how Brianna had left the oil rig and abandoned Holton to his fate, averted only by our intervention. Could the Vaetna have done the same in my case? The idea of being abandoned like that was just horrible—I had to ask Hina what exactly had happened. Over text?

“Ezzen?”

“Huh? Oh.”

Q: What kinds of projects do you intend to participate in at Todai?

Texting was too insecure; calling her didn’t seem much better. But I hadn’t seen her in person since the day before. I supposed I’d talk to her about it tonight, next time she was in my bed and it was just us. I didn’t want to confront the possibilities in daylight. It was far easier to shove those thoughts to the side and talk about magic instead. Far safer waters.

We finished the questions, and I sent them off to Overload. I think he could probably tell that Todai had a hand in their writing, but that was to be expected.

Hina did not materialize on my balcony that night. I stayed up late, watching videos and holding out hope that she’d show up so we could make up and cuddle and I could ask my questions. But there was no sign of her. Around midnight, I texted her.

Ezzen: Hey, you okay?

I didn’t get a reply.

—

Now it was Friday morning, and I had been allowed to sleep in. I was again disappointed to find no hyena-like girlfriend pressed up against me—which was a little dumb, wasn’t it? I’d been sleeping alone for the better part of a decade, and I’d only shared my bed with Hina three, maybe four times, depending on how you counted. So it was stupid to miss her.

Even once awake, I didn’t properly get up for over an hour, not until I got a message from Ebi telling me to wash up. When I asked why, all she said was:

ebi-furai: haircut.

That one word sent shivers up my spine. I didn’t like haircuts. I averaged less than one a year, and those were always just to police the split ends and knots rather than take any real length off, so over the years, the hair that had been cropped short at the time of dad’s death had developed into a shaggy, unkempt mane. I had made occasional attempts to brush it after the hairdresser had cleaned it up, but those never stuck, and it always returned to a chaotic mess, especially in the dry winter air. The hair itself wasn’t gross enough to be called matted, and my new routine’s more frequent washings with better shampoo at least kept it from being greasy. Without the grease, though, the frizziness got worse, and I had to admit that Ebi had a point. So I threw on my clothes and trudged out to the upper common area, where Amethyst was waiting.

“Haircut,” I declared grimly, running a hand through my locks in a last-minute effort to defeat a few more knots.

In reply, she pulled out her phone—tiny against the crystalline frame—and showed me a map. Most of it was in Japanese, but in theory, the hairdresser was just around the corner, easily within walking distance.

“Oh, you don’t have an in-house stylist? Or cosmetologist or whatever?” I looked around. “Where’s Ebi, anyway? I’d have expected her to do this.”

“Just us today,” Amethyst replied. Between her accent and the natural glassy, vibrato chimes of her mantle’s voice, it was hard to make out the words. She tapped on her phone again with those too-long purple claws and showed it to me.

Text is easier. This is a hairstylist we trust. Her name is Kamihata.

“Okay, lead the way.”

Thus marked the first time I saw the front entrance of Lighthouse Tower. It was an odd mix of a standard office building lobby and a themed entrance. The centerpiece of the lobby was an assortment of oversized gemstones representing the Radiances, suspended in midair and floating gently with magic. We didn’t stop to gawk—and in return, only a handful of people did a double take at the three-meter crystalline mech striding out to the front door. The main doors were big enough for her, and I trailed behind as we made our way out onto the street.

Cold, as usual. At least it wasn’t raining this morning, but the sky was definitely thinking about it, with dark, heavy clouds softening every shadow below. The indirect lighting changed how Amethyst looked, muting the brightest facets of reflection in her body into a more suffusive, translucent purple glow. People paid more attention to us on the street, but as with Opal at Tochou, I was mostly a footnote to her distinctiveness, huddled in my hoodie and trying to ease the pit of anxiety fermenting in my stomach from being out in public.

We went down the street, skyscrapers looming all around, and turned the corner. I followed Amethyst into a nondescript building—nondescript by this city’s standards still meant eight floors, but compared to the titans of glass and steel to either side of it, the building looked downright cozy. Once we were inside, Amethyst dropped her mantle. The crystal folded and collapsed downward out of reality, leaving a thin girl in its place, warmly dressed in a sweater and long skirt. Amane leaned against the wall, supported by her prosthetic arm, taking deep breaths.

“You alright?”

As she looked at me with a smile and a nod, her eyepatch lit up, projecting her eye-facsimile. This was the fancier version I had assumed existed, one which seamlessly projected a three-dimensional LM copy of her other eye, the vivid sea-green indistinguishable from the real thing after a moment. She pushed herself off the wall, found her balance, and pointed down the hall.

“Elevators.”

My foot agreed; stairs seemed draconian. As we walked, she summoned her phone from pocketspace and showed it to me.

Nice to be out of the crowds.

“Yeah. And the cold.”

“Mhm.”

The weather is nice today.

“You think so?”

The elevator took us to the third floor, which had a perfectly normal-looking barbershop. Jazzy Japanese hip-hop played from hidden speakers. It was deserted except for us, probably bought out for the duration of our appointments, and also seemed to be devoid of staff until a head poked out of the back room and called out in Japanese. Amane called back and dropped herself on the plush waiting sofa—a little too forcefully to have looked entirely voluntary. I winced; I was having some misgivings about being the only person to come along. What if she had some kind of medical emergency?

But she seemed fine; the “weather,” by which she meant the local ripple, seemed to be treating her well enough. After a minute, the hairdresser came rushing to the front of the shop with a half-bow.

Kamihata—presumably her last name—was short, with angular features and a narrow face. She was older than the Radiances, maybe in her mid-30s, and had faint smile lines around her mouth. Her hair was dyed blonde, wavy and kept in a side ponytail bound by a decorated metal clasp. I could definitely see why this place played the kind of music it did; something about the funky beat just fit her aesthetic. Her brown eyes rarely moved as she exchanged greetings with Amane, remaining fixed on the other woman’s face until they were done speaking, and only then moved to me.

“Regular haircut?”

Her accent was thicker than Amane’s, but intelligible. I nodded uneasily. Kamihata glanced at Amane and asked her something, who grinned while shaking her head. I received no explanation on what the joke was as I was led inward and guided to the nearest chair, where I encountered my least favorite part of getting a haircut: the mirror.

My pale face and sunken eyes were framed in twisting shadows. Outcroppings of frizz shot in odd directions at the top of my head, and the ends around my shoulders were so split and unkempt it seemed almost like ocean foam—but dark and heavy, as though somebody had dumped the Thunder Horse’s pipeline out over my head. I really didn’t understand why Hina insisted on calling me cute; from eyes to nose to lips, to the way they were all framed by the shaggy mess on my head, I was not a pretty person.

But that was why we were here. A haircut would make me more presentable, clean me up enough for polite society, make me seem like I wasn’t a rubbish rat who had been dragged out of its den and into the blazing spotlight of fame by unlucky fate. As Kamihata got set up, I glanced back at Amane—her hair was glossy, smooth, a nearly impeccable curtain. If she felt like she needed a haircut, how bad was my state? Humiliation swept through me, made worse by confusion as I was coaxed out of my chair and over to a corner of the room. Hadn’t I just sat down? The confusion deepened as my chair was reclined, and I leaned back to suspend my head over a basin—then it made sense.

I’d never had my hair professionally washed before. My annual-ish barber appointments were bare minimum trims, about twelve pounds—this was far more full-service, and I let my eyes slide shut as the hairstylist’s hands did their magic. The hot water felt fantastic after our brief stint in the cold, and was gone too soon, leaving me with a soaked mop of hair sitting heavy on the towel wrapped around my shoulders. That problem was solved with copious application of a blow-dryer and brush, working in tandem to defeat knots. The dryer was loud enough to drown out the music, and although I wasn’t particularly fond of loud sounds, it at least filled the air with enough white noise that I didn’t feel awkward being silent. The blow-drying felt nice—I had an absurd moment where I wondered how I could scrounge together the money to buy one, before remembering that Todai was rich.

Once I was dry, I was led back to my seat and the work began in earnest. I didn’t pick a style; between my shyness, the language barrier, and Todai’s probable particularities about the look we were going for, I just trusted that wherever I was being taken was better than my current disaster of a mane. I shouldn’t have. In my defense, I wouldn’t have been able to articulate what I wanted—but what I got definitely wasn’t it. As it was, to avoid looking straight in the mirror, and feeling too awkward to pull out my phone, I just closed my eyes and let Kamihata do her thing.

Everything went wrong when I felt the shears close above my ear. My blood ran cold as a huge fluff of hair fell off my head and landed on my shoulder, where my hairstylist’s hands swiftly brushed it down to the floor. In my naivete, I had thought I was just getting a trim—in fact, I was being shorn. 

I kept my eyes closed and didn’t say a word, too afraid to face what had just been done. Snip by snip, my head got lighter as bundles of hair were severed. Eventually, Kamihata stepped away from me.

“Open, please.”

I complied, wincing open one eye to witness the damage—and it didn’t look like me at all.

It wasn’t a bad haircut; indeed, it was perfectly serviceable, an entirely average haircut I knew was in fashion among boys my age. It wasn’t even as short as it could have been, still leaving a fair amount of fluff on my temples, but the hair that had previously gone down to my shoulders was gone, and with it, my silhouette had changed completely. My neck felt exposed to the air as I reached up to touch the new style, disbelieving.

“Are—are we done?”

“No. Do you want it shorter before the fine trim?”

“N—no.” My chest was tight, and I didn’t understand why. “Keep it long.”

Kamihata met my eyes in the mirror, scanning my face. I was obviously distraught. “Did you not want it this short?”

“It’s fine. Too late now anyway.”

It was not fine. The growth of years spent in my apartment had been removed in minutes. It was horrible, sickening, as unpleasant as having part of my flesh pared away—and it was too late. The damage was done. I shook my head a few more times, feeling the lightness, the distinct absence of a weight I’d become accustomed to for years. More than the loss of that signifier of time, I just looked—wrong. Maybe this haircut would have looked good on another person, but on me, everything about it felt awful now that the shapes of my face were no longer being framed by the hair. And I felt so exposed, unprotected; my hair had been part of my armor, and I hadn’t even realized it. I pulled my hoodie higher up around my neck.

Kamihata looked grave, calling over to Amane. But she didn’t understand why I was grieving; neither of them did. It was a perfectly fine haircut. I’d look fine on Saturday. So why did it hurt so much? Why did it feel so wrong? The wrongness, the incompleteness, who could possibly understand how—

I scrambled to pull out my phone, typing with shaky fingers.

[Direct Message] ezzen: how do you grow yoir hair back

ezzen: with magic. what are the glyphs

ezzen: sky

ezzen: tell me you know how

---

Author’s Note:

Everything is going wrong for Ez. Girlfriend problems, work, haircuts…end of the world out here, am I right?

Thanks as always to the beta readers, whose names shall be inscribed in the halls of our ancestors forevermore: Cass, Zoo, Maria, Zak, Selenium, Penguin, and Softies.

Sunspot is on break until Friday, January 10!

In the meantime, on January 3 there will be a Patreon-exclusive side story. It’s for the $10 tier and is just going to be a fun bonus, so don’t worry, nothing important to the main continuity will happen. The theme is Alice and Hina Go To The Pet Store For Christmas.

Check it out, we have fancy automatic boilerplate with pretty buttons now!We live in the future! If you want to read 2.10 right now, right here on the site, go click that orange button!

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December 20, 2024