CONTENT WARNINGS

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Ai initially seemed confused that everybody was yelling. She opened her mouth, said a few syllables in Japanese, saw me, hesitated, then switched to English.

“I just didn’t want to leave her alone.”

“So you brought her here?” Yuuka almost yelled. She jabbed a finger at Amane. “Red ripple, Ai, fuck!”

My hand throbbed in agreement, like daggers being drawn across the lines of my burn scars. And if it was this bad for me, I could scarcely imagine how badly this must have been affecting Amane—but the Amethyst Radiance seemed more concerned with her friend’s reaction. She reached up to her teammate with her bionic hand and tugged at her wrist. Yuuka frowned, looking down at her, then slowly sat back down.

“Setsumei shinasai,” Amane asked Ai. “No bullshit,” she added in English. Yuuka’s expression flickered slightly at the vulgarity, which had probably been learned from her to begin with. I gathered that Amane was asking for an explanation.

Ai hesitated. “I—we need to keep working. Izumi-san needs help, and I thought—I can’t stop working. If I stop, I’ll be too tired to keep going until tomorrow, and we don’t have that much time, so I thought if she was here, it would help me focus, and…”

Alice’s face was in her hands. “Oh my God, is that how I sound?”

“No, you’re not half this bad,” Hina sighed, bouncing to her feet and padding toward the two flamebearers standing awkwardly outside the elevator. “Ai-chan, you know the rules. No overtime at the dinner table.”

“Rules?” Ai spluttered, uncharacteristically upset. “Jikan ga kireruyo! Her mind is about to…unravel and instead of helping her you care about rules? You?”

Hina crossed her arms, resolute. “Yeah, rules. Listen, Ai: you’re overhungry and overtired. You can’t keep working tonight, there’s no point in it. You need food and rest. You know that.”

Ai made a frustrated noise, jabbing a finger at Takagiri. “She needs help, not me.” Her voice broke a little at the end; I might have seen the glimmer of tears welling in her eyes. She was at the end of her rope. “The co—the device isn’t done yet! I just need a few more hours, Hina, we can’t waste any more time.”

A single glance at Takagiri underscored her point—the effects of sleep deprivation had progressed from being purely psychological to an outright physical illness. Her skin had taken on a sickly yellow hue, and she looked a little puffy and bloated, like all the smaller systems of her body were beginning to fail from the lack of proper downtime. I’d never seen somebody standing under their own power and uninjured look so close to death’s door.

Guilt surged through me. I’d spent much of the afternoon chatting with my friends and messing about with the low-priority goal of covering up my face for whenever I might plausibly appear on camera next, when I should have gone straight to the basement to help Ai once I’d finished the mantle patches—the magical equivalent of opting for cosmetic surgery when there was somebody opened up on the operating table. I spoke up. “I can finish it.”

Hina spun and frowned at me. “Not until after dinner.”

“Are you kidding? Look at her! She’s—”

“Listen, it’ll all be fine,” Alice assured, gentler than Hina. “We’ll kill Sugawara tonight, and then Izumi-san will be okay. Ezzen, you’re sure you can pick up where Ai is leaving off?”

“Definitely,” I lied. I had little confidence I could match Ai’s prowess and dive down to the technical depths to which she’d long since acclimated—but I had to try. If worst came to worst, I was sure I could hack together something with blood magic that would at least give Takagiri a precious few hours of safe sleep, a single REM cycle to flush the worst of her deterioration and buy a few more days in the event that this didn’t all end tonight. “Actually, um, I think I’ll just eat downstairs, and—”

“No,” Hina barked. “You’re staying and so is Izumi.”

Takagiri shook her head sleepily. “Iyada. Iku—I’ll go.” She jerkily turned back toward the elevator.

Hina reached out to stop her. “Matte, matte!”

“Hina!” Alice called. “Izumi can’t stay up here, because of Amane. And Ezzen,” she added, treating me as more of an afterthought.

“Sure she can,” Hina replied. “I’ll be a sponge!”

We at the table shared a nervous glance. “Would that…work?” I asked Amane.

She shrugged and made a face that clearly meant yeah, I guess? Then she winced; another splash of pain coming from Takagiri, too subtle to register for me but clearly enough to aggravate her sensitivity. 

“No, it won’t,” Yuuka hissed to Hina, tapping her temple meaningfully.

The Sapphire Radiance shrugged and shimmied over to stand right in front of Takagiri, bodily blocking her off from the rest of us, pressing her back right against our presently male-enfleshed guest to test the theory for herself. The throbbing in my hand lessened considerably—but was replaced by an ache in my chest of an entirely different nature, a juvenile desire to not see Hina sharing such close contact with another person, a patently ridiculous, unfounded, and unfair objection to have under the circumstances.

“How’s that?”

I expressed my opinion by wiggling my hand between a thumbs-up and a thumbs-sideways, trying to keep my emotions off my face and stay objective to the problem that was being addressed.

Alice and Yuuka exchanged another look, then simultaneously leaned toward Amane from both sides to confer with her in whispers. After a few seconds of very rapid-fire discussion, they broke the huddle and Alice shook her head. “No dice.” She followed that up with a longer, apologetic-sounding explanation directed toward Takagiri, who was nodding—or perhaps nodding off. Hina nudged her, which didn’t elicit a reaction, and then poked her hard in the gut, which made her jerk back to wakefulness. Ebi released a digital sigh.

“If you guys aren’t going to actually help her, I’ll just take her back downstairs. Ezzen, be a dear and come help me keep her from dying once you’ve eaten something.”

She patted Amane’s head once and then strode toward the growing cluster of women at the elevator before anybody could object. The android willed open the elevator’s maw, grabbed the wrist of her barely conscious charge, and led her inside. She waved a hand theatrically and the doors slid shut.

Hina sighed, somehow not seeming too put out by Takagiri’s ultimate rejection. She turned to Ai, taking her hand gently. “Hey, listen, come eat, okay? You’ll feel better, I promise.”

Ai sagged into Hina’s arms and began to cry.

The food had cooled during this drama, but it was still good. More importantly, it provided an excuse for our mouths, an acceptable silence of chewing that dispelled the lingering awkwardness, making the lack of conversation instead a sign of satisfaction and mutual enjoyment. Full credit to Hina for that; time and again she was proving just how good of a cook she was, and it was difficult to resist the urge to shove mouthful after mouthful of thin, tender beef into my mouth as fast as the mechanics of chewing and swallowing would allow.

Alice made no such attempt to deny her stomach this bounty, which made me wonder again if her dragon-ka was progressing. Yuuka ate slower, but seemed just as satisfied with her shredded tofu as the rest of us were with our meat. More power to her, I supposed. And thankfully, it seemed like the physiological effects of Amane’s ripple sensitivity hadn’t harmed her appetite or digestion. This was the first I’d seen her up and about since we’d passed out in the middle of the battlefield, and any indication that she was doing well was a relief.

For once, Hina was also eating her own cooking—though she hadn’t served herself, instead simply squeezing herself in between me and Ai to pick at my bowl and the communal dish of kimchi, blue eyes wandering the table and narrowing in satisfaction as she watched her friends—perhaps more like family in her mind—partake of her efforts. She was purring faintly enough that only Ai and I could hear it.

It took Ai a little bit of time to really dig in even once she stopped sniffling; she initially seemed too sick with worry and guilt, and only brought food to her mouth out of mechanical habit rather than actual hunger. However, once the first few meager bites had vanished from her bowl, she set upon the beef and peppers with gusto, which visibly lifted her mood from so-drained-as-to-be-barely-functional to merely exhausted. As soon as she indicated she’d had her fill, Hina hugged her around the torso and asked her something in Japanese; Ai responded with a sleepy nod and stumbled to her feet, allowing my girlfriend to take her to bed like a child following her mother, a weird inversion of how I had come to regard their dynamic.

I wasn’t about to be the one to break the collective quiet that had fallen on us, but I did try to catch Ai’s eye one more time to reaffirm my resolve to pick up her work where she left off. She managed a small, sad grin as Hina led her up the stairs and out of view.

Alice cleared her throat, looking across the table as she took a napkin to the post-devouring debris that had accumulated around her mouth.

“Well.”

“That was stupid—ow!” Yuuka yelped as Amane instantly jabbed her in the side with a carbon-fiber elbow, which was good; I would have done it myself if I weren’t sitting too far away. I just tried to make my displeasure known on my face. Heliotrope gave Amethyst an affronted look, then glanced at me and sighed.

“That’s Ai,” Alice sighed. “At least she listened this time.”

“This…happens a lot, I take it?” I guessed.

“Too much,” Yuuka groused. “Fuckin’ insane of her to—oof,” she grunted as Amane elbowed her again and scolded her in angry stacatto. “Fine, yeah, it was a mistake, her heart’s in the right place, all that. But still, she should’ve known better than to bring her up here.”

Something about Yuuka’s tone rubbed me the wrong way. I agreed with the basic assertion, that Ai shouldn’t have brought Takagiri up here, but the way she said it almost felt like a clique of popular girls rejecting the outcast in a teen movie—not that I’d seen any teen movies, but I knew the trope.

“Hey,” I objected, not feeling very confident in myself at all but nonetheless feeling the need to say something. “Chill out.”

Alice raised her eyebrows at me, then nodded. “I feel we could have handled that better. Less exclusionary.”

Yuuka made it halfway through a derisive snort before Amane added something of her own. I didn’t understand the Japanese, but from both Yuuka and Alice’s put-upon reactions, it was incendiary. She punctuated it by slapping the table with her prosthetic hand, sending a clack echoing through the penthouse.

“Uh?” I ventured.

Alice stared nervously at her girlfriend for a long moment, then pursed her lips. “I’m—Amane is insinuating that Yuuka was lying that Hina’s solution wouldn’t have worked.”

“Would it?”

Yuuka looked uncharacteristically uncomfortable. “…I never said I foresaw that.”

“You tapped your eye!” Alice exclaimed. “Why lie?”

Amane added something else that made both of the other girls stiffen. Alice looked unhappy, Yuuka guilty.

“Um,” I prompted, a little afraid of the ire growing on Alice’s face even without it being directed at me.

“Normally she dodges the elbowing,” Alice explained. “She didn’t just now, which indicates that her foresight’s still a little off. Which, in turn, means that Yuuka must have had another reason to want Takagiri gone. Amane suspects that that’s because our guest is in a male body. Which I’d very much hope is not the case.” The air temperature at the table was rising, betraying Alice’s emotions even though her voice was precise and enunciated. “What do you think, Ezzen?”

“Oh. That sounds…bad,” I ventured lamely. “Though—I mean…I’m here in a male body,” I pointed out awkwardly. I immediately cringed at myself—whether because of stating the obvious or because of discomfort about the fact itself, I couldn’t say. Probably both.

Yuuka harrumphed. “Yeah, but you’re…Ezza. You’re fine.”

“But I’m…not a girl,” I clarified. The image of Asuka that Star had sent floated across my mind, which I tried to banish. “I thought we established that. Something nonbinary. But Takagiri’s an actual girl, body or no. And you were fine with her yesterday!”

“I was—I was…” she scrambled for an explanation. “I didn’t fuckin’ mean it like that! It was a real problem for Amane!”

Amane slapped the table again, which made Yuuka yelp. It was followed immediately by the very unhappy-sounding thump of Alice’s tail on the rug. The temperature at the table had risen noticeably; the common spaces of the penthouse weren’t chilly, but the air had gone from distinctly warm to now being like sitting next to an open oven.

“Yuuka, that’s completely unacceptable,” hissed Radiance Opal. “Takagiri might have been our enemy up until a few days ago, but she is suffering more than any of us right now, and the last thing she needs is you being a misandrist shit at her. That is absolutely not conduct befitting a mahou shoujo.”

I expected Yuuka to snap back at that, for this to explode into an argument that would derail the entire evening. Instead, that last part of Alice’s scolding made Radiance Heliotrope physically flinch as though struck.

“Gomen nasai,” she muttered, voice full of contrition. “I didn’t—that’s not what I meant. It’s different when she’s here with us. Fuck, that sounds—not good, yeah. Why the fuck did I do that?”

“We’re going to talk about this more later,” Alice decreed. “I expect you to apologize to her, once she’s in a mental state to accept it and once we’ve delivered justice to the person tormenting her.”

That was the moment Hina returned from upstairs, leaping over the upper-level railing and landing without so much as a crouch to absorb the impact before bounding over to us.

“Yikes,” she said as she felt Alice’s aura of wrath. Then she seemed to lock onto Yuuka’s contrite turmoil. “Hey, babe, you okay?”

“Don’t call me babe,” Yuuka snapped back, some of her usual animosity reigniting. “Fuckin’—shit, yeah, I’ll apologize. Once we kill Sugawara. It’s all his fault anyway.”

“Kill!” Hina crooned, looking at me affectionately. I gave her a hesitant thumbs up, a little jarred by the topic change but relieved to be moving away from whatever the hell that had been. Yuuka clearly had some stuff she needed to work through.

Alice nodded, the mom-voice melting out of her tone as the room cooled back to its normal temperature. “Yeah. Yeah. Let’s—let’s get ready to go for that instead. I didn’t want to set out until at least 10PM, and it’s only 7 now, but with how Takagiri looked to be doing…time is of the essence. Let’s get the mantle changes set up. Ezzen?”

“Was that food supposed to re-energize us?” Yuuka groaned as she double checked the silvery thread of her weaving. “I mean, I’m not hungry anymore, but fuck, I don’t feel awake enough to go raid a Hikanome base. If that’s even what we’ll find there.”

“The sleepiness goes away when you’re mantled up,” Alice reminded her. That was news to me at the time.

“Oh, really?” I asked, then felt stupid for opening my mouth. I’d spent hours poring over those very psychomotive systems today; it was pretty important that they limited sensations from the main body. That was the whole reason Amane spent so much time in her mantle, after all. I changed the topic to the other, and arguably more interesting, part of what Yuuka had said. “Uh, never mind. Wait, Yuuka, your eye’s not giving you anything?”

“It’s not so good at long range. Once we’re there I’ll know.”

Amane muttered something that I would have bet money translated to something like “and also not so good at close range.” 

Hina shot me a carnivorous, heart-fluttering grin. She’d been the first to finish weaving the update into her mantle, though she hadn’t tested it just yet. “Who knows what we’ll find?”

She sounded outright excited for that.

“Hopefully nothing out of the ordinary,” Alice said from her spot on the couch, twining thread between her fingers. “Just the prison, with the usual rotation of guards and absolutely no festering remains of the cult.”

But we all knew things wouldn’t be so simple. Two of Todai’s men had gone missing when they’d been sent to investigate, which was why the Radiances were prepared to show up carrying the biggest sticks in Japan, now freshly proofed against the weapons that had posed a problem last time.

The upgrades I’d made could be thought of as a patch in both the software and sartorial senses, functionally for the former and haptically for the latter; the motion of Alice’s hands wasn’t unlike that of a seamstress mending a torn garment. Beyond that, though, physical description became difficult, since not all of the lattice that projected the mantle was in our slice of three-dimensional space. From where I was sitting, it just looked like Alice had a bunched-up tangle of glowing thread in her lap, though in reality, it was a carefully designed and tuned piece of technology, a war machine of sleek power and complexity to rival a fighter jet. For all that power, though, watching the four Radiances at work was a great reminder of how all glyph-based magitech was fundamentally bottlenecked by flamebearers performing the manual and bespoke process of weaving Flame, no true—or at least Turing-complete—automation to be had.

Pontifications on industry aside, the girls were making quick work of the upgrade—including Amane, who wasn’t participating in the mission because she required far more involved repairs to her mantle before she’d be combat ready again. She seemed content to work in parallel to her teammates nonetheless…though “content” was maybe a strong word. It mostly seemed like something to distract her from glaring at Yuuka. The argument hadn’t reignited once Hina had returned, but things felt like they were simmering, and honestly, I was sort of hoping the girls would get out of here soon and take the awkwardness with them.

As for why I was still up in the penthouse with them instead of booking it straight to the basement to keep working on the coffin, I wasn’t entirely sure. In theory, I was in a supervisory role, since these were my designs, but there was honestly nothing to it; surely the girls would be able to work out any kinks on their own. My antsiness to go help a certain snarky android with Takagiri gave me the courage to speak up.

“Um. Can I go? For Takagiri.”

Hina hopped to her feet. “We gotta test!”

“Do I need to be here for that?”

“I want you to see it!”

“See…your mantle?”

“Yep! It’ll only take a minute,” she assured me. “You haven’t seen it yet, right? Somehow.”

She was right: I still hadn’t seen Hina’s mantle up close. My only opportunity had been when she’d been the cerulean meteor that destroyed Hikanome’s festival, and that ruined her mantle along with it. The impact had been so explosive that it had ablated away the LM, leaving her exposed by the time we’d had face-to-face contact.

Alice had told me this morning that it was still in need of repairs, but apparently Hina had made quick work of that once I’d kicked her out of my room. Unlike the way Amethyst’s mantle had been destroyed, apparently Hina’s case had been a much cleaner breakaway. And Hina was unrivaled among the girls when it came to weaving, which probably helped as well.

I didn’t even really know what her mantle looked like, beyond the broadest strokes. When I’d first arrived at Todai and skimmed the girls’ Wikipedia pages, her mantle had been her featured image, but I’d scrolled past it hurriedly, embarrassed to be looking at something so girly. But now I’d get to see it up close and personal, watch as her T-shirt-and-booty-shorts-clad regular body was swapped out for its lattice-manifest warmachine copy.

“Sure.”

Hina’s face split into a huge smile. She pirouetted theatrically, then shouted, “Houseki hikare!”

A flash of blue light washed over everything for a moment, a shadow of how she’d dyed the entire world at the festival. I blinked away the dazzle as her whole body glowed, squinting, trying to see if I could pinpoint the exact moment the swap happened. A swirl of white-and-blue sparkles wrapped around her, settling over her clothes as she stretched her arms out and winked at me. The swirl coalesced into arcing shapes of gemstone that bound themselves around her, seeming to erase the clothes, then they settled into glowing silhouettes of tassels and a short skirt, ridged fingerless gloves that went all the way up her forearms, gemstone brooches on her chest and hips—and when the light faded, there stood Radiance Sapphire.

Honestly, the girly aesthetic wasn’t for me. I didn’t like the frills on the skirt or the ribbon in her hair. But I couldn’t deny that this artificial version of Hina was ludicrously good-looking; the extra twenty-odd centimeters her hair had gained contributed greatly to that, as did the makeup and the more abstract knowledge that this was a form made of pure magic. She put her hands on her hips.

“Well?”

“Um.” It took a moment to get my mouth working again. “Well—uh—when the bands of crystal moved past where your clothes had been.”

“What?”

“Oh my God,” Yuuka sighed. “You were looking for where the swap happened? Live in the fuckin’ moment, cunt.”

I shrugged helplessly. “What do you want me to say?”

“Am I pretty?” Hina asked. She flirtatiously posed and blew me a kiss. “Look aaaaall you like.”

“Fuck’s sake, bitch,” Yuuka grumbled, though it sounded more like it came from obligation than any really strenuous animosity—and out of the corner of my eye, I saw her glance up toward us.

I tried to ignore that and gave Hina another hesitant up-down, feeling wrong for doing so even with an explicit invitation. “I think…I mean, yeah, you look good,” I admitted. To be fair, it was very hard for Hina to look bad in anything, and this brightly colored display did highlight so many of her best parts, hips and lips and bouncy energy and—I noticed something. Two things, actually, and not meaning her chest for once. “Hold on. Your eyes got less blue.”

It was subtle, and you’d probably not be able to tell the difference at a distance, but I’d spent quite a lot of time sneaking glances at those sapphires up close, and I could tell that the supernaturally rich hue had been ever-so-slightly washed out.

“Yeah,” she confirmed, sounding annoyed. “The meat-eyeballs are real special magic. Real Flame, raw. I told Alice that we could totally get them looking closer, but—”

“No, Hina,” Alice sighed in a way that told me they’d had this argument a hundred times before. “Too much overhead.”

“See!”

“Fair enough,” I reasoned; maybe it was something for us to tinker with later. At least she still had her fangs, which were much easier to imitate. She also had an option for regular human teeth, which I was grateful she wasn’t using here. It was vaguely alarming how much I had come to like my girlfriend’s once-terrifying bestial mouthparts. “Um—testing, right? Everything as it should be?”

Hina broke the pose, flapping her forearms experimentally. “Seems good.” Then she startled me by launching into a cartwheel and vanishing. Before I could worriedly ask the other girls whether that was supposed to happen, she popped back into existence. “Yep! All good!”

I gave Alice a probing glance, wondering if that passed her standards. She shrugged. “If Hina says it’s good, it’s good. Good job, Ezzen.”

“Me?”

Hina snorted. “Yeah, cutie. It’s your work! You made this happen! Be proud!”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. My usual coping mechanism kicked in. “…Thanks? What about testing against the pink disruptors in the actual swords?”

“Got it right here!”

Hina announced that far too casually for somebody who had just pulled a katana out of thin air. She proffered the handle in my direction, and I took a cautious half-step backward. “Um. I’m not much one for swords.”

“C’mon, cutie, this is great! You get to hit me and prove your designs are solid, all in one swing! That’s, like, perfect! Have at me!”

I gave a vaguely panicked look to Alice, who snorted and made to get up. “Hina, if he doesn’t want to, I’ll do it.”

Hina responded to that with a whine and puppy eyes, which were damnably effective even in their slightly off-brand hue. “Fine,” I sighed, hesitantly reaching out and gingerly grabbing the sword’s hilt. It was surprisingly light. “Am I just to…poke you with it?”

“Right in the titty,” Hina purred, which elicited an unhappy noise from Yuuka. Hina rolled her eyes. “Fine, just, like, in the hand. Not like the place should matter, right?”

“Right.” I hefted the sword, bringing the blade close to her outstretched hand. Surely, Hina wasn’t actually going to get off on this, I told myself, not with how the mantles worked. Or maybe she will, argued a treacherous part of my mind. The invitation did feel sort of ritualistic.

I told the voice to shut up, steeled myself, and brought the edge of the blade to Hina’s palm. That should have been enough to activate it, but nothing happened—neither catastrophic damage to the construct nor any kind of breathy moan from my pain-loving girlfriend.

“Yay!” She cheered. “Works for me. Hey, babes,” she shouted over her shoulder unnecessarily, “it works for me!”

“Heard you the first time,” Alice acknowledged, a grin in her voice. Yuuka shook her head. Amane, who had been quiet thus far, gave us a bionic thumbs-up.

I sighed in relief, lowering the sword. Despite myself, I was finally starting to feel a little pride in my work; it was distinctly satisfying to see that not only had my edits not broken anything, they’d also solved the problem, and for once, that included practical proof. I immediately knew how I should ride that wave.

“Well, if it works, then can I be done here? Don’t want to delay on the coffin any more. I, um—okay, not that I don’t want to be helpful, and I do want to see how the mission goes, but I really think I should just—”

“Sure, sure, go ahead,” said Alice. “We can take it from here. Go help Takagiri; Ebi can set you up with a video call to watch us downstairs if you want, yeah?”

“Sounds good.” I gave Hina a shy double thumbs-up of my own. “Stay safe? What am I supposed to say here?”

“That works, but no promises,” she teased, leaning toward me affectionately. I wondered if she was about to kiss me, but instead she just reached out and pried the sword from my hand, simulacral fingers pressing under mine in a way that was almost as intimate. “We’ll be back soon. Gotta go kill a monster.”

Author’s Note:

Takagiri rejected from the lunch table. At least we finally saw Hina’s mantle, huh? Complete with transformation sequence, because a girl’s gotta go to war.

Speaking of mantles, it’s Amane’s turn for a poster! (By Grimmjeow, as usual)

Isn’t she pretty! Obviously her mantle isn’t this big by default, but concessions can be made for the camera. Patrons over in the Discord said this is their favorite one so far, and I think I agree. If you’d like to see the alt version, get early access to future commissioned art, help support me, and get straight into the action with 3 early chapters, check out the Patreon!

Next week’s art won’t be Yuuka’s poster as you might expect; it won’t quite be done by then. Sorry to anybody who’s been eagerly awaiting a canon depiction of her Yuukas. Instead, I’ll have some nice pride month ship art to share!

Thanks, as usual, to the beta readers: Cass, Zoo, mirrormatch, Altrune, Maria, Enigma, Penguin, & Zak. This and the next few chapters were pretty difficult, and their input has been super valuable in making them come out clean.

That’s all for this week. See you next week!

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«Threading The Needle // 3.03

May 23, 2025

Threading The Needle // 3.05»