CONTENT WARNINGS

Possession/mental violation (Takagiri has a rough one)

I’d repeatedly heard Sugawara referred to as “comatose.” This was true, but what everybody had left out was that he was also mangled. His body was a patchwork of burn scars, and there was no hair left on his head. His nose was destroyed. He was surrounded by beeping and humming medical equipment: a forest of IVs and intubation surrounding the central megalith of a heart bypass machine. He was effectively already dead, even though the vitals signs insisted he was alive.

“No boss at the end of the dungeon,” Hina quipped, leaning over the bed. “Looks like him, smells like him.”

A buzzing sound pulled my attention away from the screen. I looked over at the source: Amane, clenching her bionic fist so hard the tiny actuating motors in its joints were crying out in protest. Her delicate features were twisted by an emotion I couldn’t name and had never known, something in that bitter space between terror and profound loathing.

On-screen, Yuuka made a similar face for just a moment before her mantle’s mask dropped to neutral impassivity. A spike of jealousy crawled through me at her ability to simply choose not to emote within her mantle. Alice caught the expression.

“Yuuka? I need you to give us an honest answer, disregarding your own feelings. Is it safe for us to kill him right now?”

“Yes.”

Hina frowned, squatting at the side of the bed to look at Sugawara’s ruined visage in profile. “You absolutely sure, babe?”

“The sooner the better for Takagiri,” Ebi pointed out.

“Barring the bomb,” I couldn’t help but insert. I knew the Radiances onscreen couldn’t hear me, but I felt like I had to bring it up to the others in the room with me. “We still don’t know if—”

“Ezzen,” Ebi interrupted. “C’mon.” She said something in Japanese to Amane, who replied curtly and instantly. Ebi made an ‘OK’ symbol with a robotic hand. “If there is a bomb, Amane will handle it. We’re out of time.”

I was in no position to argue that. We were out of time, and there was absolutely no chance I was going to be able to convince any of the Radiances to delay. I took a deep breath and decided to trust Amane on this one. “Fine. Can we at least put her in first?”

“No,” Takagiri broke in, the first English words she’d said in what felt like hours. “I—I want to…” she blinked too slowly. “See him die.”

“…Fair enough,” I conceded, feeling rather overruled. Everybody else here had much more investment in this moment than I did; for them, this was the killing of one of their old monsters.

“You don’t have to watch it yourself,” Ebi pointed out. “You didn’t do so good with the last murder.”

I found I agreed with that and tried to focus on the coffin’s final checks. Some indicator lights had come on and were holding steady, which said we were as close as possible to turning it all the way on short of engaging the main wards. The coffin might have wound up being redundant, but it was something to do instead of bearing witness to Todai’s latest crime. I didn’t even want to know which of the three girls present would be the ones to do the deed.

“All good on our end,” I heard Ebi say.

As my hands traced along the coffin’s ward emitter mounts one last time in a final sanity check that everything was installed where it ought to be, I heard some shuffling and quiet discussion from the Radiances on the screen, which fell into silence as final deliberations concluded and the moment of execution came. I heard a hiss like a valve releasing air, then a wet noise that suggested a horribly manual and mundane killing, blade through flesh and sinew rather than any sort of magical annihilation. Then Amane exhaled, and I knew it was over.

The next few things happened very quickly.

The first is that Yuuka shrieked. “Ami ga—”

The second is that her voice was muffled, drowned out by a sound not unlike the sensation of one’s ears being waterlogged. At the same time, there was a flash of light on the screen, and in the moment that my eyes were reflexively drawn to the commotion, I saw that she had drawn her cloud of crimson glitter around herself and was in the middle of frantically weaving silver thread.

The third was that Sugawara’s freshly beheaded corpse sat up.

Faster than a blink, Hina punched it in the chest with such force that her fist went clean through. Gore splattered onto the bed and medical equipment behind the exit hole into a shape that was too perfect—a glyph, one I knew intuitively.

{TRANSPOSE} ignited into harsh yellow Flame, and burning brambles blasted out from the corpse, a sickly yellow slithering and whipping out through the room, attacking the girls, attacking everything. A part of it came directly at the camera—directly at Alice—

Directly at us. The video feed cut out from Alice’s end; the static dripped out of the projected screen like sap, taking on a branching, thorny aspect as it traveled and pooled on the floor. Then something rose up from the malformed transmission, there in the room with us, having made the same impossible leap as my flamefall.

The thing that entered our basement room of Lighthouse Tower was a nest of brambles in the shape of a man, blazing with the same sick yellow fire that had illuminated the glyph, and it stood wide and hunched, arms dangling beneath it. It had no hands and no face, but as it raised its head, I felt it see me, inspect me. Agony lanced up from the stump of my foot, freezing like icicles were spearing through my veins. The pain made me stumble for a moment before the stabilizing unit in my foot caught me. My spear was in my hand.

To my right, Amane blubbered an awful noise of pain that indicated she was feeling the same or worse, but she didn’t stagger. Instead, something glimmered around her bionic arm, shapes crystallizing from nowhere as the indicator lights along its shell flickered from their usual purple to a violent red. Her mantle was still in a state of ruin—but evidently, she still had contingencies, magical firepower spooling into existence around her arm even as she raised her clenched fist in the apparition’s direction and squared her stance.

Takagiri’s mantle was similarly ruined, and she made no attempt to weave any magic as she stared at her tormentor. But her eyes were full of hate—and fear. This entity was no glowing specter or bedsheet-covered figure, but it was unmistakably Sugawara’s ghost. He stepped toward her unnaturally quickly, as though on fast-forward—

Ebi reacted before any of us. In the same moment that her physical body stepped forward to stand between Takagiri and Sugawara, something deployed from pocketspace over her shoulder and launched itself forward. It unfolded from nowhere into the vague impression of a polyhedron before it flashed outward into an emerald-green bubble, surrounding the spirit.

I raised my spear, finding that I wasn’t feeling so squeamish about murder at this particular moment.

Amane barked something, which Ebi interpreted with a seamless shift of her synthesized voice: “We’re killing him here and now.”

The bramble figure turned his head to look at Amane and reached a burning arm out to the bubble, pressing his twisted fingers against the barrier. He began to push on the barrier, extending an arm against it, straining the barrier and stretching it like taffy, his unsettling yellow Flame angrily scattering along the surface. The way he was reaching out, the strain of the bubble—why did that look familiar?

“Ez, get your Flame out,” Ebi said, shaking me from the odd moment of deja vu. “Amane, you ready?”

Amane grunted confirmation as her gun finished manifesting. It wasn’t the same weapon as the one typically embedded in her mantle’s arm; instead, it was a surprisingly familiar shape, a gemstone version of the enormous energy beam weapons that came on a Peacie AC-130-R heavy gunship, absolutely comical against the regular size of her human frame as its four barrels bristled above her shoulders, hovering as though fixed to an invisible armature.

Without any further indication from Ebi, the bubble vanished. In the same moment, four lines of purple energy ignited the air between Amane and Sugawara. The weapon emitted an awful, teeth-aching whine as she held the searing beam for several seconds, trying to burn through his chest and head. She was yelling invectives at Sugawara, voice breaking in what could not have been anything but rage—was she literally powering the attack with her fury?

Maybe, but that wasn’t an option for me. While Amane unloaded on her kidnapper, I called on my Flame the only way I knew how, biting my lip and attempting to will it forth. It sputtered for a moment before a sensation like heartburn splashed through my lungs and my Flame ignited within me. Frigid energy lanced through my arm and bubbled to the surface of the scars on my right hand, which I clenched into a fist as the pure white of my shard of the Frozen Flame made its presence known. I didn’t know what exactly to do with it yet, but that was answered for me by observing Amane’s own attack.

For all her weapon’s power, its impact on Sugawara was underwhelming. The weapon’s effect was blue ripple, and Sugawara’s spirit, whatever it was, was certainly not a physical thing, some amalgam of raw Flame. For the most part, the beam passed straight through him and ate away at the wall behind him, blasting through the drywall and sending sputtering globs of magmatic concrete onto the floor but failing to meaningfully interact with the thorns. The yellow of his Flame shone through the purple as if to taunt us. It did slow him down some, resisting his movements like the barrier from before—still damnably familiar—but that was all.

He shuffled forward through the beam until it flickered and then failed, the barrels of the weapon fracturing and decohering above Amane’s shoulders. The indicator lights on her arm died, and the limb flopped uselessly downward as some operating limit was overwhelmed by the surge of magic she’d summoned, her contingency expended for naught. Sugawara’s spirit was not a complete person, lacking a face and speech, but as the last dregs of purple energy faded, the vomit-yellow fire pulsed a few times, and I saw his ‘shoulders’ shake as he laughed at us. Then he blazed toward us, far too quick to make sense, an impossible burst of speed just as one of his cultists had performed dozens of kilometers away and hardly a minute earlier. He covered five meters in a step—panic found me in a critical moment of indecision, unsure whether to brandish my Flame itself or to grip the haft of my spear and bring its warped and heat-blackened tip around to face him.

That moment of hesitation had a terrible cost. The brambles twisted and writhed past me before I could act, tongues of yellow fire passing so close to my skin that some of it tried to cling to me, grasping and stabbing in a blind desire to possess, to control, to grasp and devour everything. But the moment a tendril of thorny flame actually touched my skin, it recoiled, jumping back as though startled, and Sugawara avoided me as he passed me by—

But I was not Sugawara’s prize. The brambles lunged at Ebi, who was shielding Takagiri with her body. The spirit of malevolent Flame would rush straight through Ebi and fry the fragile magical circuitry that made up her being as a simple side effect of seeking his true target, and she stood poised to accept that fate if it meant buying her patient another moment of time—

Takagiri shoved her aside. It was a sleepwalker’s motion, half intentional and half inevitable, impossible to tell whether it was defiance or acceptance. The mass of twisting thorns loosened and spun into a torrent of grasping Flame that blasted directly into her chest as she met her tormentor head-on.

The way Sugawara entered Takagiri’s body could only be described as violation. The brambles wrapped around her limbs and dug into her flesh, rising up around her head and forcefully trying to infest her mouth and nose and ears and eyes, clawing and digging, demanding access to her body and soul as they tightened around her. She remained standing, but not under her own power, instead animated to plank-stiffness by the constricting force of Sugawara’s will.

I tore my eyes away from the sight as I scanned the room, trying to understand what to do. Time slowed to a crawl. My gaze alighted upon the whiteboard; if I could only intuit the sick processes animating Sugawara, allowing him to cling to the realm of the living, then I could formally describe them and crack the code; obliterate him utterly through glyphcraft where Amane’s brute firepower had failed. But that was an absurd notion, desperation asking me to reduce the work of hours down to minutes or seconds, however long Takagiri’s already-failing mind could resist before it collapsed, and he slithered in to claim lordship over the ruins.

There was no time for all that; there was only one reasonable option. I found myself stepping toward the effigy of nightmare and pushing my hand to ignite some more.

“He avoided touching me just now,” I explained to the room as I moved—mostly trying to psych myself up for what I was about to do. “Because of my Flame!”

“Christ almighty, Ezzen—” Ebi began.

I ignored her, reaching toward Takagiri with my blazing hand and searching for a relatively non-spiny segment of the brambles that were constricting her arm. My fingers, or at least the Flame wreathing them, found purchase on the magical emanation of Sugawara’s twisted desires, and I tried to tug.

I felt an emotion that was not my own. Something wicked and covetous flowed through me, a vile and potent desire. I wanted—Sugawara wanted—to have his way with Takagiri in a far more sickening way than even that phrase would suggest. He sought to devour her, to supplant her, to dominate her Flame and puppeteer her body as his own, the final parasitic effort of raw malice attempting to claim a new mind and body before it dissipated forever. He already had a doorway into her soul, the same one we’d been holding shut by forcibly keeping her awake and had been hoping to bar by using the coffin. And he craved to pry that doorway larger, to flay away her already-tattered defenses and scoop out all that was her to replace it with him.

Sugawara’s raw, unbound emotions surged into me and made to seep deep, infest and control me just as it was doing to Takagiri, because that was all he was now—blind want, not only to keep existing but to continue exerting the power over her that he’d had for years, first in the abstract binds of a poisoned friendship and then in a more literal sense as he’d dug his thorns of Flame into her and made her his slave. That avaricious, solipsistic egotism was all that remained of him, what passed for thought in this remnant shadow of the man he’d been. Somewhere beneath the weight of his basal ego, I could feel Takagiri fighting back, but it was a losing battle. Her mind was like layers upon layers of kindling for his rapacious Flame, unable to truly resist the overwhelming desire to dominate, half-ruined as she already was by the extreme exhaustion. She couldn’t even muster her own magic in any meaningful sense.

For a teetering moment, I felt that I might also be ensnared and devoured, paralyzed and reduced to so much soul-meat for the carnivorous beast Sugawara had become by simple contact with its consumptive nature. He had become a singularity of such concentrated malice that it seemed impossible for the delicate, fractal complexity of any wholly formed human soul to persist under the conditions of his presence.

But I was more than just a human soul. A knife-flash of clarity pierced through me, a frigid cold from the backstage of the universe that cut deep into the brambles and drowned the sickly yellow Flame in blinding white. Something rang in my head, a voice I’d only heard a handful of times until now.

Repugnant, declared my shard of the Frozen Flame.

Sugawara may have lost almost everything that he once was, but he still had a capacity for pain. I felt him hurt as the brambles under my grip wilted and then withered, dissipating away. I sensed something buried within the nest of brambles move where it had previously been restrained. Emboldened, I thought to reach toward Takagiri’s chest, where Sugawara’s thorny presence had tightened most thickly, hoping to break his hold on her there. I reasoned that her mind may have been ostensibly in her head, but if my experiences with my own Flame were any indication, the chest was what housed a Flamebearer’s soul, their final redoubt of selfhood alongside their Flame.

All this happened in the time it took the nerves in my arm to reach my brain and report an explosion of pain. It was from many sources—both Takagiri and Sugawara were radiating their own kinds of agony from their struggle, my own Flame was scorching my hand with frostbite, and the whole storm of magic we were creating was only amplifying the soup of red ripple. My mouth was filling with the tang of iron, and my face was wet. Nonetheless, I tried to move my arm further in, but some part of my subconscious simply wasn’t having it and said no more, overruling my conscious desires. I instinctively jerked my hand back, then shuddered and collapsed to the ground.

I felt arms on my shoulders as someone—Ebi—pulled me back, away from my goal.

“That’s enough.”

“It’s—not,” I blubbered, realizing the wetness on my face was a mixture of tears and blood. Had I been bleeding from my tear ducts? Certainly from my nose, at least. My Flame sputtered in my hand—the pain was keeping it fed as embers, but my concentration and willpower had reached their limits.

“It is,” Ebi insisted, wiping off my face with a rag she’d produced from somewhere. “She’s fighting it now. Don’t gotta explode yourself any further.”

I blinked away the remaining residue of bodily fluids and squinted through my wobbling vision at Takagiri. Bright white dots of my Flame still smoldered on the brambles, and she was now visibly struggling against the brambles with her limbs—and more importantly, something was flickering in the air around her. Her mantle had been destroyed in our battle, but something remained, and that she was calling on it was all the proof I needed that I’d helped weaken her attacker, or empowered her, or both. Either way, what had been a one-sided ravaging now seemed to be more of a struggle of wills.

And Amane was walking—limping, really—closer to the struggle. I only had a view of her left side, so it took a moment for me to figure out that she’d entirely removed her fried right arm, which made it all the more insane that she clearly intended to mimic what I’d just done.

“What’s she doing? Amane! What are you doing?” I looked up at Ebi. “Why aren’t you stopping her?”

“Because she’s not doing what you’re doing.”

“Ezzen,” I heard Amane say. “The coffin.”

“What?”

She held up her remaining fist, the flesh one, and clenched it. “Hold the…tamashii ga…” she faltered, glancing at Ebi, and started rapidly spouting Japanese. Ebi listened for a moment, then picked up.

“She’ll beat him, push him out. But she can’t destroy him, and he’ll just try again, and he’ll never stop. But if we put them in the coffin, once she kicks him out the first time, we can pull her out while keeping him trapped. Then we find a way to kill him.” She mimicked Amane’s pointing at the coffin. “Help us get them in there.”

“By…what, lifting her? Neither of us are at what I’d call—” I coughed, and the taste of iron in my mouth thickened, “carrying capacity.”

I glanced down at my own right arm, which neither looked nor felt great after being the contactor for a terrible collision of arcane wills. My fingers only weakly responded to my attempts to close them into a fist, and it hurt like hell to do so, cracking the abused skin. It felt like the scar tissue might flake right off. That was still a degree more useful than Amane’s now-removed arm, but it meant we effectively only had two and a half arms between the two of us to try to lug Takagiri’s still-mostly-bound-or-otherwise-unresponsive body into the coffin. And that was before considering the psychic onslaught I’d endured.

“Terrible pun,” Ebi quipped. “Carrying capacity? Really?”

“Sorry,” I groaned.

“Don’t worry. I’ll help with the lifting.”

“I thought you couldn’t let him touch you or…bad stuff.”

“Before, probably. But he’s reeling now, and he’ll have to split it four ways. Besides, I’m built for bad weather.” She reached out a hand. “Up!”

She delivered that last part with such authority I found myself using my good hand to reach out and take hers. She pulled me to my feet with almost contemptuous ease. As she helped me find my footing, something pinched my neck.

“Ow!” My yelp only lasted a moment before relief washed through me. “Oh, that’s nice. Morphine?”

“And other stuff.”

We went over to stand an arm’s length from Takagiri. Ebi released me to join Amane on Takagiri’s other side. For a moment, I felt the absurdity of how we were solving this problem—three flamebearers and a cutting-edge AI in the room and we were reduced to literally dragging a person with our bare hands, a far cry from anybody’s image of magical warfare. It was ridiculous. But as I prepared to grab hold and Amane held up three fingers to count us in, I figured that it maybe wasn’t that much more brutal or inelegant than the blood magic I’d recently been so fond of. The last of Amane’s fingers lowered, and we all reached out to Takagiri.

Without the direct protection of my Flame, I’d been bracing myself for another helping of the crushing weight of Sugawara’s desperate desire, but Ebi had been right—he was weakened, and now his attention was split four ways, unable to smother any one of us individually. Where previously he had been an overwhelming force of concentrated, avaricious desire to dominate, now the pulse of emotion I got was tinged with the animal need to survive. Still not fear, per se, but he was recognizing the danger he was in.

That wasn’t to say this close contact was safe. Hopped up on morphine, I arguably fared better than either of the women helping me; Ebi’s motions didn’t falter, but the moment she touched Sugawara’s brambles, her digital face scrambled into static, which was mildly terrifying, and Amane would have probably been screaming if her teeth weren’t gritted in a mask of focus as she did her best to help with her single arm. I hooked my arm under Takagiri’s armpit and we started to drag her stiff, twitching body toward the coffin, step by heavy step.

Our goal was the bench-like cot that was set on rails to allow the coffin’s occupant to be slid in and out easily, and it was only two or three meters in total to carry her there, but it was a struggle all the same. The soul-combat taking place in our arms was a miniature inferno, and the random bits of orange ripple distorted the space of our steps, making a step forward turn more diagonal before we readjusted. Some kind of fungus was growing in the wake of where Takagiri’s feet dragged along the concrete floor. I was too focused on the physical exertion at the time to worry about the long-term ripple effects on my own body.

We managed to lay her down on the bench, Amane and I grunting with the effort. Takagiri’s eyes were open, staring upward, but not focused on anything, instead flickering left and right in something akin to REM sleep; she was presumably battling Sugawara in her dreams now. The flickers of her mantle were intensifying, too, never quite coalescing into recognizable portions of the woman we’d battled but undeniably becoming more present, more real. Ebi pushed the cart into the center of the coffin’s main body, that mangled and haphazard nest of metal and wiring, as Amane and I limped over to the laptop that controlled the whole thing.

“This better work,” I muttered, glancing over the machine, trying to ascertain if there were any last-minute changes we could make in order for this plan to happen as Amane had described. By way of answer, she hit the ‘Start’ button on the program that was supposed to run this whole thing. I crossed my fingers.

Indicator lights flickered on, and power relays hummed. I saw the ward emitters within the cage of scrap metal shimmer, then glow—then go dark, which terrified me for a moment before I remembered that they weren’t supposed to emit light at their operating levels. At the same time, the overall level of aching in my body, and especially the sharper pains in my hand and foot, began to ebb and reduce. It seemed the coffin was containing the red ripple—and presumably all the other colors we’d intended with our modifications.

As if to put that notion to the test, there was suddenly a flash of light in the heart of the machine as the struggle reached its conclusion. Takagiri vomited out a cluster of brambles, the ones that had infested deep into her body. They were rotting and blackening, the shadowy aspect of her own Flame finally asserting its dominance in the struggle for control. Something shimmered over the gaunt, sickly mask of pain—a narrow, feminine aspect, teeth set in defiance. Her own face, her true face.

She screamed something, and the brambles tore off of her body as though scoured by a pressure washer. I didn’t need translation to get the message.

I reflexively braced for another surge of red ripple to come at us…but there was nothing, no more pain. The yellow energy of Sugawara’s soul was ripped off of her body and slammed into an invisible, bumpy barrier at the perimeter of the coffin’s interior, looking like the world’s most repulsive corncob as he attempted to flee from Takagiri in all directions and found he could not. I watched the ward emitters’ readouts on the laptop screen as the strain steadily but evenly rose among all nine nodes. Once it stopped growing, the moment Sugawara was fully expelled, Ebi would yank Takagiri out.

But then all the pressure began to concentrate on one emitter, the one mounted directly above her head and held in place by the clamps we’d used. I was helpless to do anything but watch as the yellow Flame bundled around it and pressed outward. I looked frantically at Amane, who returned the gaze with fear, at a loss for what to do. I opened my mouth to call to Ebi to just pull Takagiri out now as I tried to muster my Flame once more—

The ward exploded upward with the tremendous screech of violated metal into a spray of molten aluminum that splattered against the ceiling. The yellow Flame shot out after it in a stream of brambles, but stopped midair, collecting itself in a flash. Before any of us could do anything, the space around Sugawara’s spirit tore, flattened, and shrank to a dot of nothingness, taking every scrap of that bile-yellow with it. Whatever remained of his intellect had calculated—or even overheard—our plan, decided it didn’t like its odds, and fled the premises of Todai’s domain.

Sugawara had escaped.

But Takagiri was free.

Author’s Note:

Whew, a lot of action! This will be the first ever time that we end an action beat and stay in the scene without Ez passing out for a day (well, there’s 1.14, but he wasn’t physically there and injured). Surely Sugawara is gone for good, right? Right?

Important: Sunspot is on its usual one week break! The next chapter will be July 18.

No newly commissioned art this week, but somebody in the Discord (Karidyas) took it upon themself to touch up last week’s Alice+Amane art with lighting, and holy crap did they do a good job:

I’m so ridiculously jazzed about this; it may well become some kind of banner art or find some other home here on the site.

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

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!

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

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June 7, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Unlike what I’d seen of Ai’s premier magitech—Amane’s bionics and Ebi’s chassis—the coffin was not a pretty thing: a mess of plywood, sheet metal, 3D-printed parts, and exposed wiring. It did resemble a coffin in shape and size, large enough only for a user to lay down inside it, but more like the skeleton of one, affording no privacy to the occupant if there were somebody else in the room. You’d have to rest in full view of all the mess Ai had made—not that that would pose an obstacle for Takagiri, I suspected.

Ai had first thrown it together four years ago as a temporary solution for Amane’s ripple sensitivity, which at the time, had been even more severe, and temporary solutions have a way of becoming permanent. Amane had stopped needing it at some point, so the Radiances had banished the ugly reminder of pain to one of the multipurpose storage-slash-workshop rooms in the second sub-level basement. Now its day had come round once more, but it was in no condition for use. It was surrounded by spools of wiring of various types and thicknesses, wood and metal structural pieces, and various power tools that had been discarded in Ai’s haste. 

The upside of this mess of innards was that nothing was hidden, which made it easy to visually identify which parts went where. The main functionality came from the set of inward-facing ward projectors, of which six were already installed and three were not; they were supposed to be arranged radially in three rows surrounding the occupant, not unlike the spikes of an iron maiden, but the third row seemed to have been abandoned before the mounting bar could be installed, presumably because Ai had been sidetracked by various other problems arising from integration hell. 

My job was simple enough: get it working. But I was way out of my depth.

“…I’m not seeing a hole for the screw,” I admitted, gingerly comparing one of the fifty thousand-dollar ward emitters to the bar it was supposed to mount to. “There’s one on this bracket here, but there’s not another on the bar.”

“If you’re thinking of {AFFIXING} it, don’t,” Ebi warned from the sidelines.

“I wasn’t gonna!” I lied.

“Just clamp it.” She pointed at a pile of wood glue clamps on one of the fold-out tables. That did make more sense given the time pressure; I’d successfully woven {AFFIX} under duress before, but now was not a time to fumble with magic when mundane tools would do the trick, ugly as they were. I reluctantly grabbed a clamp that looked big enough. It took me a moment to figure out how to even open the jaws, then I slid it over where I was pressing the mounting bracket against the wood post. I squeezed the tightening trigger a few times, and then jiggled the expensive equipment experimentally to see if it was bound securely against the bar. To my relief, it didn’t budge.

The clamp was precisely the sort of ugly and awkward solution that characterized everything about this ramshackle project. Proper fasteners or magic would be far more elegant, but this didn’t have to look pretty; it just had to work. With the help of two more clamps, I at least had the ward emitters all on the same bar and facing the same direction.

That was the easy part. The real issue was that each of the three emitters had a bundle of unlabeled cables emerging from the back like a synthetic ponytail, and I had no idea what to attach them to, let alone how to make sure they were getting the right power and signals. At a ripple theory level, I understood that these wards were supposed to generate a fully enclosed field that absorbed and dissipated red and pink ripple, but the hardware was far beyond my ken.

“Uh…”

“Table to your right. See those three breadboards? You do know what a breadboard is?”

“Of course I do,” I snapped, “But I’m not really a…hardware person. Don’t know where to plug any of this in.”

“Use the schematics!” She pointed at my laptop, which was sitting in a cleared region of the nearest of the fold-out tables. The android had sent me all the necessary diagrams and schematics for each individual magical and electrical component, but there was no grand plan for how to put all of it together into a working machine; the closest it came was an absurdly messy whiteboard next to the laptop that bore a mixture of magical notation I understood and electronics diagrams I didn’t. Worst of all, the scribbled notes were all in Japanese, making it all even more impenetrable.

“Sure,” I muttered. “It’s—why aren’t you the one doing this, with your five degrees? Weren’t you here while Ai was working on it?”

In response, Ebi tilted her head meaningfully at the third person in the room.

“It might not look like it to you, but I have my hands full trying to keep her alive.”

Takagiri was looking really quite bad. Her flesh looked even more sickly than before, and she’d developed a distinct set of tremors. Her face was drooping in a way that made me concerned she was having a stroke; I guessed that sleep deprivation this extreme was probably having similar effects. She was having serious issues stringing words together, too, and I’d mostly given up on trying to communicate with her, even for encouragement.

She still insisted on pacing to and fro as a way to keep herself awake and was accompanied in stride by Ebi, who’d already caught her from hitting the floor twice. Those moments of lapsed consciousness were becoming more frequent, which only worried me more as I tried to wrap my head around the mess Ai had made. Supposedly, these moments of micro-sleep weren’t enough for Sugawara to invade her mind; this was a good thing, since it meant that he wouldn’t know that the Radiances were coming for him nor have a chance to set off the still-hypothetical bomb attached to her soul, but I was starting to wonder if that was a worthwhile tradeoff.

The Radiances were supposed to set out in a few minutes, and from there, it was a few minutes’ flight to the hospital-cum-prison where Sugawara hopefully was; even if he were warned right now—which itself made assumptions about how swift and easy his access to Takagiri’s recollections was—could he, as a comatose body in a hospital bed, even do anything? Aside from the bomb, again. And if he wasn’t there, moved by whatever remnants of his faction still clung to him, then maybe the advance warning would cause more of a problem for us. Maybe.

That was to say it really just seemed like a lot of ‘ifs’ and speculation between Takagiri and the sleep she absolutely needed. And given how infuriatingly slowly I was making progress on the coffin, I had half a mind to just make the call to let her sleep and deal with the consequences after the fact. Especially if Ebi wasn’t going to help me.

“Seriously? There’s nothing else you can do to help out?”

Ebi’s voice modulated down to a serious, dire tone. “You do not want me any nearer to this thing if you accidentally turn it on.”

I remembered something from earlier today, how Ai had mentioned offhandedly that the walls had pink and red in them. That’s just Ebi, she’d said.

“Fine,” I shrugged, annoyance building. “But it’s—it’s not going well, if you can’t tell,” I admitted as I hobbled over to the laptop to inspect the ward emitters’ pinout schematics. “If there’s anything you can do, then do it.”

“Overpromised and underdelivered, did ya?”

“If you’re not going to do it, somebody has to,” I snapped, picking up the laptop. My frustration was spilling over toward my low mobility; I was losing precious time ambling back and forth between the coffin and the laptop, with my foot still a little ginger.

At that moment, I heard the room’s doorknob click. I whirled to face it on reflex, tattoo itching with a surge of anticipation. There was no reason for anybody to be down here; it wasn’t that late at night, but Ai’s students and machinists had all cleared out for the day, and the Radiances were all up top, due to head out any minute now. The memory of creepy happenings elsewhere in this basement earlier today caused my tattoo to stir; what if Takagiri hadn’t been hallucinating? What if something was here? What if Sugawara had somehow gotten enough information in those moments of microsleep, and now he was making—

Ebi emitted a digital imitation of a snort. “Ha! The way you jumped!”

I glared at her. “You’re fucking pranking me now? Fuck off!”

“No,” she chuckled. “Somebody more qualified has arrived.”

The door swung open, and there stood Amane, wearing her soft nightclothes and a determined expression. I made it halfway through the first phoneme of objecting to her participation before realizing that she’d most certainly had enough of that. She walked into the room, head held high. A small hitch in her gait betrayed that she was most definitely feeling Takagiri’s radiated pain, but it didn’t slow her down, nor reach her face.

“Um,” I stammered, “I’m guessing the others don’t know you’re here?”

She replied in Japanese, which Ebi was happy to interpret in real time for me. “They’re up on the roof. Fuck knows I’m not going to stay all alone up in the penthouse when somebody needs help down here. I know these systems better than anyone, even Ai-chan.”

I raised an eyebrow in Ebi’s direction about the insertion of “fuck knows,” which didn’t sound very mahou shoujo at all. She met it with a virtual raised eyebrow of her own. Then the relief hit, and I decided I didn’t care about that. I looked back to Amane.

“Okay—um—alright—yes,” I landed. “Please.”

A few minutes later, Ebi displayed a video on the wall via the room’s overhead projector. It was a live feed of Alice’s perspective—essentially bodycam footage, which when combined with the cover of night blanketing this mission, left me feeling a little like we were doing something illegal. Which we were.

Alice, Hina and Yuuka were gathered on the rooftop as we were in the basement, making their final checks before setting out. All three were mantled, but they’d changed their costumes to something much less flashy and decorated; instead of whites and vibrant, saturated colors matching their gemstones, dark greys and blues predominated, and where there had previously been decorative brooches and tassels, now there was nothing. These versions of the mantles were lower-profile, stealthy, not for the public’s eyes. If the mantles could generally be thought of as fighter jets, these configurations were more like stealth bombers, complete with radar invisibility and currently inactive camouflage. The girls’ eyes still glimmered in the dark, though, Hina’s impossible blue and the angry crimson crags of Yuuka’s gemstone sharply visible through what we saw of Alice’s gaze.

They launched off the rooftop platform as one, a violent jerk of motion that sent my stomach spinning so badly that I had to avert my eyes from the wall and instead focus on the nest of electronics in my hands. My glimpse of their takeoff was still long enough to glean something of note: in this stripped-down mode, much of the usual artifice was gone, which meant that their flight produced no actual streams of energy in their wake, at least not at these speeds; it was more like rapid Superman-style floating than rocket-powered acceleration.

“Is this two-way?”

“Not in, like, a video call sense,” Ebi explained, reaching out to flick Takagiri’s nose, the latest in an increasingly-dubious set of tricks to help keep her awake for just a bit longer. “They’d freak out if they knew Amane was down here with us.”

I only snuck occasional glances at the screen as they flew; they were low enough that you could still somewhat make out the terrain below, which wasn’t nearly as high as—to pick a random example—a high-altitude Spire maintenance stream where it seemed like they were just floating in a misty void, and that was too low for my acrophobic sensibilities.

Amane’s assistance with the coffin had been transformative. Not only did she know exactly how all the little components fit together, the telekinetic modules in her arm were fantastically suited to the subtle dexterity required to fit the electronics together, just like the screws in my computer case last week. She inserted pins into breadboards and {AFFIXED} together electronics too delicate for clamps with a swiftness and precision that told me she knew exactly what she was doing, which was a huge relief—enough to paper over the envy I felt. Occasionally, my hand and foot would throb and her face would flicker into a mask of pain, but it didn’t slow her down.

The other Radiances were going fast too. The video stream of Alice’s vision included small diagnostic readouts, among which was a speed gauge currently registering well above the speed of sound as the trio of magical girls shot across the sky; an icon on the readout had flickered for a moment as her mantle suppressed the sonic boom to keep a low profile. There was a frankly dizzying amount of information crammed into the corners of what we were seeing, too much to reasonably keep track of; I had to remind myself that this was a sort of debug and diagnostic view, and that Alice herself was receiving much of this information more intuitively through the mantle’s pink ripple channels. She didn’t have to look to know her airspeed or orientation or position relative to her teammates or the ground. I was envious of that quasi-omniscience, the lack of a clunky interface, the data direct to the mind through infomancy. I’d have that with a mantle of my own.

“Ezzen,” Amane prodded me with a bionic finger. “Ugoite.”

I blinked, then flinched, then cringed at my own moment of distraction.

As I clumsily laid the bar of ward emitters into place on Amane’s direction, the away team began to slow and descend, the blob of light that made up Yokohama crystallized into a nighttime skyline twinkling in thousands of distinct lights from the buildings and cars. They descended further, far too rapidly for me to stomach, going away from the densest lights and toward the edge of the city.

They didn’t land all the way, instead slowing to a hover at what the readout said was two hundred meters above the ground. Below them lay Sugawara’s prison, semi-isolated from the rest of its neighborhood by a copse of trees. Acrophobia made my stomach jump a little bit as Alice’s view of the building zoomed in. Like Lighthouse Tower, it had once been a hospital and now served to house a flamebearer—but instead of a home base, it had become a prison. Nominally.

“Not liking this,” Alice muttered. “No guards.”

In reality, the Radiances were going in expecting it to be the final redoubt of Sugawara’s sect, a fortress inhabited by his most fanatic followers and fortified with whatever scraps of magitech they still had from before he had been deposed, like more weapons in the style of Takagiri’s swords or potentially more esoteric weaponry. The layout was also a dark mirror of Lighthouse Tower—where the Radiances’ base was vertical, the prison was no more than five or six floors and distributed much more horizontally, with distinct north and west wings.

Something like envy briefly stole my attention when I noticed Alice’s bust at the bottom of her vision, an entirely unwarranted emotion for this moment. I was spared from having to shove aside the feeling myself when Alice raised her head to look at her teammate.

“Yuuka? Close enough?”

The team’s precog nodded. She would have been hard to make out in the dark if not for the various sensors of Alice’s mantle amplifying the visibility and highlighting Yuuka in the heads-up display. She looked even more goth in this darker version of her outfit, with previously metal-looking fixtures retextured to dark plastics and much of her smooth, pale skin now covered by a dark, skintight bodysuit. My mind wandered somewhere it ought not have for a moment until Yuuka replied to her teammate’s prompt. She stared down at the hospital below.

“Yep. He’s—yeah, he’s down there. And still…konsui,” she muttered, switching back into Japanese for lack of vocabulary.

“Comatose,” Ebi supplied for me. I glared at her, having already figured it out myself from context.

Yuuka’s expression darkened. “But we’re in for a brawl. And…we’re not rescuing Ogawa-san or…oh. We’ll find Kiriya-san.”

“Alive?” Alice’s tone was pessimistic.

Yuuka was quiet for a beat too long. “…Yes.”

“They’re torturing her?” asked Hina, straight to the point. There was a note of contained, anticipatory energy in her voice.

Yuuka replied with only a hollow nod as she tore her eyes away from the prison, too rattled by whatever she was seeing to make a jab at Hina about sadomasochism. That made Hina’s shockingly blue eyes narrow, her fingerless gloves bunching into fists—what I’d interpreted as sadistic anticipation may have actually been rage.

Next to me, Amane’s hands paused on my laptop keyboard. My heart dropped into my stomach, idle fantasies of feminine bodies immediately banished by horror.

“Um,” I asked the room, “Kiriya-san isn’t a flamebearer, right? So there’s no…”

“No reason to do it,” Ebi confirmed. “Maybe blood magic, but more likely just to provoke us.”

Amane raised her wrist to her mouth and whispered something into it, voice tight. Her prosthetic was apparently linked into the mantle comms network, judging by how the Radiances on-screen visibly flinched.

“Go loud,” Ebi translated for my benefit. “Get her back.”

“What if it’s bait?” I asked. It felt awfully convenient for them to leave just one of the two Todai operatives alive.

“Could be. Won’t matter.”

On the screen, Hina nodded as though she’d heard me, though she was probably responding to Amane. “Well, it’s not like we were just gonna walk through the front door.”

“Do you know where exactly she is? Or Sugawara?” Alice asked Yuuka.

“He’s where we left him. She’s…up top, I think; I see a window. North side, I think.” She pointed at the appropriate spot, and a marker appeared in Alice’s HUD. “Start there?”

“Yes,” Alice confirmed, waving to Hina.

The Sapphire Radiance grinned. I recognized that as bloodlust, at least. “Right through the roof?”

“No, they have a hostage; if they have time to react, things could get messy. Blink in, find her, free her. I’ll get her to safety while you two go after him. Then you can go loud.”

“We killing?”

Surprisingly—or maybe not surprisingly at all—that came from Yuuka. Alice sighed.

“Aside from him? Try not to, alright?”

“No promises,” Yuuka muttered. She looked over to Hina. “Well, kemono. Fetch.”

Hina nodded and flipped midair so she was facing downward. Her legs tensed into a crouch, compressing against nothing—then she launched earthward, receding to a speck in an instant with a dull whoosh. I had just enough time for my breath to catch and to be confused, since it looked like she was about to crash straight through the building, the exact opposite of what Alice had said. But instead of a thunderous impact, she just…vanished, shifting into the fourth dimension.

Imagine a box drawn on a piece of paper. From the two-dimensional perspective of a flatlander living in the paper’s world, the box would be closed, the interior inaccessible from any of the possible directions they can move in their two dimensions. But if you, a human, were to put your finger right in the middle of the box from your lofty, transcendent position in the third dimension, you’d find those walls utterly irrelevant. You wouldn’t be phasing through them per se; you’d simply be approaching them from a direction in which they don’t exist.

This is what Hina did, only raised one dimension up, a four-dimensional intruder into the three-dimensional box that was the prison’s interior. She went around the roof of the prison, intersecting our slice of reality again once she was inside. We in the basement of Lighthouse Tower didn’t have a camera feed from her, only Alice, but it was easy to imagine her blinking and dashing through the halls in search of Ms. Kiriya.

Four long, quiet seconds passed, and then the north wall of the prison exploded outward in a sapphire flash. From our lofty perspective, it looked almost comical, a demolition in miniature. But the spark of blue that shot outward and upward back toward us was very real; she had left destruction in her wake and carried in her arms a limp, red body. Bile rose into my throat as I saw in closer detail what had been done to Kiriya; she didn’t have much skin left.

“She’s alive,” Hina confirmed as she flew up to her teammates. “Back home? Ebi?”

“No,” Ebi said, taking in the Todai operative’s grisly, defiled state in a flash and making the executive call. “Too far, and I’ve got my hands full here. I’m calling the next nearest hospital now. On your HUD…now. They’ll take care of her.”

“Agreed,” Alice confirmed urgently. “You take her there, Hina—”

Hina rocketed away before Alice could even finish her sentence, leaving just the team’s leader and precog. It had hardly been ten seconds since Alice had authorized Hina to go in, and that was already one mission objective done: rescue whoever had survived. One Radiance had taken seconds to storm through and rescue a captive and get out untouched.

“They’re not well-equipped,” observed Alice, putting my thoughts to words.

“They can’t stop us,” Yuuka agreed. Something glittered through the air around her as she looked down at the hospital, some sort of half-summoned weapon or preparation for further magic.

Down below, the flicker of flashlights was visible as a handful of cultists began to spill into the area surrounding the hole Hina had blown.

“Yuuka,” Alice said.

“Alice.”

“I know you’re angry. Don’t get stupid.”

Hina’s voice came through the comms. “But give ‘em the what-for anyway!”

“Damare,” Yuuka growled.

“Also, touching down at the hospital now, looks like they’ve already got a stretcher, and—hai, Radiance Sapphire desu—”

As Hina became embroiled in handing over Kiriya, the remaining two Radiances began to plan their own entry, and I forced myself to stop looking at the screen. I glanced at Amane, who seemed transfixed by what we had just seen.

“Amane?” I reached out to poke her, as she had done to me—she almost shrieked when my finger made contact, scrambling away, eyes wild. I retracted my hand hurriedly, cursing my stupidity. This was clearly a reprise of old trauma for Amane, and startling her was woefully insensitive of me. “Uh, shit, sorry. You okay?”

Amane took a deep breath, then glanced at Ebi and Takagiri. Ebi nodded reassuringly at her and said something in Japanese, which convinced Amane to take a deep breath, clenching and unclenching her fists. “Daijoubu.” She strode back over toward the coffin, a slight hitch in her step. We were getting close to being able to turn it on; the wiring was mostly in place, and now, we just had to double check that everything had been hooked up correctly before we turned it on for calibration; if we’d made a mistake, we risked frying Ebi.

I limped over to the whiteboard where we’d assorted the most relevant hardware connections, glancing again at Takagiri. At this point, she’d given up on pacing, and was standing slumped against Ebi, who had replaced one hand with a mechanism I couldn’t identify other than that it had a little electrical arc on the end. She was gently zapping Takagiri awake every ten or fifteen seconds.

“Just—just a few more minutes,” I assured her.

She didn’t respond verbally, but her eyes did flick to me briefly before unfocusing back to staring into empty space. Ebi gave me an encouraging thumbs up with her free hand. “I think you’ll make it at this rate.”

“Great,” I muttered, looking between one of the breadboards and the whiteboard’s notes. I wasn’t quite sure what this part did, to be perfectly honest, but I could at least make sure that everything connected how it was supposed to. “Looks good here,” I called to Amane.

She raised a prosthetic thumbs-up from where she was crouched next to the coffin’s head. It was looking slightly more coffin-like now; one of the big modifications Ai had wanted to make was the addition of some damping panels near the head, which she hadn’t gotten around to installing but Amane and I had managed to finagle into place. In theory, those would help distribute the load to the various wards lower down the body, and they filled out the skeletal structure somewhat, at least near the head.

As Amane rose back to her feet, motion in the corner of my eye made me turn; some part of me was still braced to see a ghost in the corner, but of course, it was just the stream on the wall. Alice and Yuuka were descending, down and down, until they were hovering just above the prison’s center. Alice touched down all the way, dark, slim boots making contact with the prison’s rooftop. She manifested her staff in her hand—again, with no flash or other decorative animation—and pressed the tip to the rooftop. Next to her, Yuuka held up four fingers, then three, then two, then one, then—

A thunderclap came from the stream’s audio, and the roof was no more. Without ceremony, the girls dropped into the last lair of Sugawara’s cult. A man in a sweater and slacks was the unfortunate first contact; he skidded to a stop in front of the sudden cloud of debris, then turned and began to run the other way, shouting furiously. Yuuka shot down the hall and collided with him in a flying kick, sending him to the floor and probably breaking at least a few bones. She was already moving past him, and Alice sprinted after her.

They moved through the corridors at a lightning pace. Nobody could stand in their way at first; all the cultists they encountered were unarmed and unaugmented humans and were either completely ignored or shoved to the side. The Radiances said nothing, moving in easy sync as they advanced.

The first real bit of resistance was when Yuuka held an arm out to signal a halt as they came to an intersection. A moment later, an orange beam of energy shot across the space they’d have run into. Yuuka strode around the corner, and then there was a scream. Alice followed a moment later, revealing that Yuuka had kicked the cultist in the groin and pried the ‘gun’ from his hand.

“Duct tape and hardware store parts,” Alice observed. “But they’ve got a Flame benefactor, at least.”

“Not a very good one,” Yuuka opined. “That wouldn’t have done anything anyway.”

“Still.”

Alice tossed the doohickey into her pocketspace, and they resumed their advance. They ducked into a random, vacant hospital room not unlike the ones on Lighthouse Tower’s eighteenth floor; Yuuka counted them in once again; Alice obliterated the floor, and they dropped down another level. It wasn’t entirely clear to me why they were taking this route, but it seemed like they were encountering relatively few cultists. Or maybe there just weren’t that many to begin with.

Another floor down, resistance became fiercer, and the cultists…weirder. More and more of them were in states of undress, dim mirrors to how so many people at the festival had been topless—some of Hikanome’s practices remained consistent between its iterations, it seemed. These members were more fanatic; one tried to charge Alice, which felt almost like he was underwater compared to how swift the Radiances moved. We viewers got a disgusting up-close shot of open wounds on his chest before she slammed him into a wall. He tried to scramble to his feet, so she hit him again. He tried to get up a third time, and she sighed and shot him in the knee with her staff.

“Yuuka. Sanguimancy.”

“Yep. Not for anything big, I think.”

The next person they encountered made Amane gasp. He was gangly, with close-shaved hair, and was bleeding openly from the stump of his left elbow. I thought her reaction was just because of the gore—but I put the pieces together when Yuuka roared. There was a blur of light and motion, and suddenly, the man was right in front of the Radiances, moving far too fast, laughing at us. The space where his arm should have been shimmered unnaturally as he reared back to swing—

Alice shot him in the head. We saw it so clearly through the stream that I jumped back involuntarily in shock. The beam removed the center of his cranium and he slumped over, dead. She prodded the corpse with the tip of her boot.

“What the fuck,” said Yuuka. “That’s Kazuha.”

I glanced at Amane, then Ebi. Clearly this was somebody from their history with the cult, but I had no idea who. “Who?”

“One of Sugawara’s old lieutenants,” Ebi supplied. “Trust me, he deserved that.”

Amane looked—not shaken. She was actually grinning at the image of the corpse, which was a little disturbing. Then she caught the look I was giving her and turned away from it hastily to keep testing the coffin; we were a handful more checks away from being able to power it on.

“So this is the last of them,” Alice said onscreen. “And they’re not attempting to run.”

At this point, Hina blinked into existence next to them. “Hey! Oh, hey, dead Kazuha!”

“Kiriya is stable?”

“They’re taking care of her! Also, there’s some funky netting in the out-space around here. I think it’s for me. Smells bloody.”

“I’m liking this less and less,” Alice said. “Yuuka, you’re sure this isn’t a trap?”

“Things are getting fuzzier,” she admitted, looking down the hall. “But it’s not a trap. He’s there. Hina, don’t jump any more. The ‘net’ is—”

She fell silent a second before a sword blade came through the wall. It would have struck Hina, but Yuuka shoved her to the side and grabbed the blade in a way that would have definitely cut her hand open if this were her real body. She snapped it off and yelled something at the wall. While Hina strolled through the adjacent doorway to put paid to whoever had just been stupid enough to ambush the precog, Yuuka and Alice inspected the broken-off blade.

“Was phenomenally stupid to grab it like that,” Alice chided.

“It’s like Takagiri’s,” Yuuka defended. “Which we’re specifically proofed against now. I knew it was fine.” She looked directly at the ‘camera,’ addressing me. “Nice one, Ezza.”

“Uh, thanks,” I replied, before remembering that I was the only one here who couldn’t directly speak back to them.

“As I was saying,” Yuuka resumed, “the net isn’t to catch you. I think breaking it will trigger something red or pink, so just don’t touch it, kemono.”

“Whatever you say, babe!”

The Radiances arrived at Sugawara’s room less than a minute after. There were four guards outside, big and burly and carrying what were definitely smuggled ripple rifles; Hina dispatched all four with trivial ease and blinding speed, literally throwing the first into the rest and disarming them in the chaos. These ones didn’t seem like fanatical cult members, more like hired guns, and they didn’t seem keen on spending their lives fighting flamebearers, electing to stay down.

After a quick nod of approval from Yuuka, Hina kicked in the door as well, and the Radiances came face to face with arguably their oldest nemesis.

At least what remained of him.

Author’s Note:

Finally back into the action. The Radiances sure do make quick work of regular humans, even ones using sanguimancy and ramshackle magitech. I wonder what Sugawara’s been up to!

As a reminder, you can read the next three chapters by supporting me on Patreon, as well as see art commissions before they become public. Thank you to everyone who’s supporting the story already!

This week’s art is a break from the posters, because I commissioned some art that I wanted to share before the end of pride month:

Art by Cloudya. I’m working on making a nice photo gallery for all the commissioned art now that we’ve started to accumulate a bunch. Also, the arc 3 cover is almost done, so hopefully you’ll see that replace the placeholder by next week.

That’s it for this week. I’m gonna get very busy soon, but I’m hoping to be able to maintain regular updates at least until the end of the arc.

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

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May 31, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

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!

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!

May 23, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

Making a mantle was a lot more involved than the instinctive immediacy of blood magic. I needed a full infomantic scan of my body, custom substrates, a lot of integration testing, and likely days’ worth of weaving once every other step was completed. I certainly wasn’t getting it done today, and I doubted I would get anywhere beyond the basic skeleton of the diagram before I needed the Radiances’ help.

They’d be involved anyway, of course; Alice had stipulated that a mantle would be necessary if I were to eventually go hunting with Hina, presumably for combat capability. But that was secondary to the true appeal: an alternate version of my body, one that I could fully customize to look however I wished, a face I could show the world that wasn’t this.

While I was pondering this, the chatroom exploded

starstar97: thana what the FUCK

DendriteSpinner: Hey maybe don’t be posting that?

starstar97: not cool

moth30: yo

The image vanished from the chat a moment later.

skychicken: @thanasen don’t post irl photos of chat members

starstar97: ^

thanasen: oh sorry

Sky to the rescue.

ezzen: Thanks, Sky.

ezzen: Yeah, please don’t do that.

My curt reply hid the fact I was so rattled that my hands were shaking. My response to seeing my own face—or more pertinently, to the fact that my face was now public knowledge—was psychosomatic, sending my blood pressure through the roof and making me physically nauseous and a little dizzy. I could see sympathetic DMs from Star piling up in the corner of my screen, but I had to turn my chair away from the keyboard for a moment and just squeeze my eyes shut as the revulsion worked its way through my system.

“Cutie? You okay?”

I opened my eyes to see Hina sitting on the edge of my bed. She was in what had been a full black-and-white skirt suit, appropriate formal wear for a TV apology, but she’d shed the jacket, undone the buttons on her shirt, and ditched the skirt. Her cerulean eyes were full of concern and immediately soothed me.

“Uh. I think so. Now that you’re here,” I added lamely. It was sappy and romantic but true. “How long have you been there?”

“Just got here.” She hopped to her feet and over to me while pulling her socks off, never seeming in danger of falling over. She tossed them aside and bent over to nuzzle my face.

I felt my heart slow and reached up to touch her neck in return; it just felt right. “Okay, yeah, definitely better now. I was just—” I separated from her and pointed at the screen, where the chatroom was angrily buzzing along. “Dealing with stuff.”

“Mm.” The blue eyes traced over to my main monitor. “Mantle patch?”

I blinked. “Uh, yeah. Mostly done now, just routed the pink leak into a water splitter offgas, based on what Takagiri did in her own mantle. Should mean the swords have minimal impact now, if we—uh, you, I apparently can’t come, sorry—run into more on the hunt. Which is tonight, apparently,” I rambled, mouth running on autopilot while my eyes wandered around my girlfriend’s front. God, she was hot, half-undressed like this; a welcome distraction, arrived at just the right moment.

Hina rewarded my gaze with a teasing little wiggle and a grin, her arms reaching past me to rest on the chair’s backrest, trapping me. “Tonight, hm?”

“Uh, yeah,” I stammered, blushing, “so I really need to get it done. It’s most of the way there, I think.”

Her expression softened a little. “You weren’t working on it when I came in.”

“I was…dealing with stuff, like I said. Um. I don’t know, just people being idiots and not respecting privacy.” I tried to swallow down the residue of the panic attack. “There’s been some yelling about your apology, too, but I think that hasn’t got much bearing on how it actually went?”

She shrugged. “Went okay. Hate the fucking suit, hate the cameras. Missed you the whole time. Scooch over.”

I complied, making some room in the chair, and Hina happily tossed herself into the gap next to me, cuddling against me. The chair definitely wasn’t meant for two people, but she made it work. A different kind of shudder passed through me. “Um, yeah, I missed you too.”

A purr passed through her body. “Tell me I did a good job. With the apology.”

“I didn’t watch it,” I admitted.

“Doesn’t matter!”

“Okay. Good job? Well done, Hina?”

The purr intensified, which made it easy to dismiss the habitual discomfort at letting somebody else see what was on my computer. I’d been discussing gender stuff with Star, and it was fine by me if Hina saw that.  I swung our chair back toward the keyboard.

ezzen: Yeah, I’m okay.

Hina snorted. I rolled my eyes.

ezzen: But that reminded me that my face is out there in public, and I wanna do something about that.

ezzen: Test out bodies and faces with a mantle until I find one that fits me.

starstar97: ooooooo

Hina echoed Star’s intrigue, shifting against me. “Mm?”

“…I don’t like my face,” I admitted aloud to her. “Which is something we can deal with magically, right?”

“Masks,” Hina confirmed. “Always masks.” She sounded a little sad, and I brought a hand off the keyboard to awkwardly pat her knee. She shifted against me. “You shouldn’t have to care about what they think.”

“Hina,” I warned. We were trying to work on her habit of othering normal humans.

“I—sorry,” she whined, “not trying to be all us-versus-them about it, but it’s just fuckin’ dumb! I don’t want to wear their fuckin’ costumes, their uniforms, and that’s bad enough when it’s just clothes. Stupid suits and big conferences with cameras.”

I nodded sympathetically while I waited for Star to reply. When she did, it floored both of us.

starstar97: ok, gender exploration hypothetical, stop me if this feels unproductive or like its putting you in a box: if you had to look like one of the radiances, which would you pick?

I gaped at the screen, then glanced at my shoulder, where Hina was firmly pressed up against me. The blue eyes darted up from the screen to meet mine, and we shared a long moment of awkward silence.

“Do I tell her I literally have one of them pressed up against me? She’d die of jealousy.”

“I’m actually curious, cutie.”

Oh no. Hina was taking this seriously—I was being tag teamed by my girlfriend and best friend. “Um. None?”

“Bullshit. I see the way you look at all of us. How about Yuuka? Big ol’ titties strike your fancy?”

I leaned away from my girlfriend in what little space I had to do so. “Whether it ‘strikes my fancy’ is beside the point, isn’t it?”

“Lotta overlap between what you’re attracted to and what you want to be.”

“Fine, but—I don’t want big ol’ tit—” I cut myself off before I could finish the vulgar word; it felt horribly offensive to use for somebody I knew. “Fine, no, not Yuuka. Too short, anyway.”

“Hmm. Tell her that,” Hina commanded.

“What, tell Yuuka?”

“No, cutie, tell your internet friend.”

“Oh.”

ezzen: Not Heliotrope. Don’t want to be short.

starstar97: so no big fuckin titties for ez… hm

starstar97: go on (☆ω☆)

I sighed, exasperated. Hina snorted.

“Alice?”

“Are we counting the tail?”

Hina shrugged, which I felt more than I saw. “Ask.”

ezzen: Does Opal include the tail?

starstar97: is there a reason it shouldnt

ezzen: Academic rigor?

starstar97: opal includes tail

“Then no. Huge inconvenience.”

“But she’s massively pretty.”

“She…is,” I conceded. Even saying that out loud, and even when specifically prompted to do so, felt like an overstep. “But that’s not—I don’t look at her face and go ‘God, I wish that were me.’ Which is what Star is after, I think.”

Hina nodded against my chest, which I took as my cue to report these findings.

ezzen: No Opal then, either. Nor Sapphire.

“Hey! Grr.”

“I mean, I want your physicality, but I don’t want to look like you.”

And I definitely didn’t want Star to start talking about my girlfriend’s body in too much depth when she was right here. Even though Hina would probably like that, because it was sure to get me flustered.

starstar97: damn so no boobs AND no hips?

starstar97: really leaning away from the feminine figure then huh

That brought me up short, surprisingly. Yes, I wasn’t particularly enamored with femininity, but I hadn’t considered my dismissal of Alice and Hina to be dismissing the two most…be-hipped…of the Radiances, at least in terms of the proportion to their waists, and now that I was thinking of it in those terms…

Hina watched the gears turn in my head, tantalizing cerulean in the corner of my eye.

“Hips are good,” she prompted.

“Hips…are good,” I realized. Would I feel less inclined to hide my body under layer upon layer of heavy, form-obscuring clothing if I had more of a figure to show off? I wasn’t sure—but that wasn’t an immediate and obvious ‘no’ in the way I had responded to having a chest like Yuuka’s. “Huh.”

ezzen: Raincheck on the hips specifically.

Hitting enter on the message, admitting it to somebody who wasn’t literally pressed up against me, made it suddenly feel real, so strongly that it was an actual sensation, an odd but not entirely unwelcome pressure in my core.

starstar97: OOH

starstar97: that sounds like progress!

ezzen: I guess it is? It’s definitely something. But I still don’t want to BE a girl.

Hina shifted to nuzzle my neck as I typed that out. I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean, but it felt nice.

starstar97: ofc ofc

starstar97: does that make sapphire your pick?

“Uh.” I didn’t particularly want it to be.

“Hmmm,” Hina hummed against me. “No love for Ai? Muscles good,” she pointed out.

“Muscles good,” I conceded, “and there’s…nothing wrong with how she looks. She’s quite…quite pretty, actually. Strong and toned, but not too bulky.” I reflexively rubbed my bicep in a futile attempt to dispel the awkwardness of rating somebody I lived with. “But if I’m headed in the direction you are, mutations-wise, then that’s not really a factor, is it? I’ll hardly have any muscle mass at all and still be ludicrously strong, right?”

Hina giggled. “Yep! Sounds like that’s what you want, so that’s what the Flame will give you.”

That gave me something more abstract to latch on to, bigger yet safer to discuss.

“Why’s it such wish fulfillment for you and not the others?” I realized a moment later that that was a slightly stupid question. It had fulfilled Alice’s wish and put a twist on it, and in a way, it had done the same with Hina—her emotional extremes were hardly an unalloyed blessing. I revised the thought before Hina could explain what I’d already figured out. “Is Todai an outlier, or does the Flame select for people who want to change? I mean, you, me, Alice, Sky, Takagiri…”

Could that have something to do with why I was twice-touched? Was my desire to be something else part of why the Flame had chosen me? The first time, I’d been a kid. Now I was…not quite an adult, but in that intermediary phase, right at the cusp, at the boundary of change. That felt significant, based on what I now understood of the Flame’s relationship with emotion and desire.

“Maybe! What about Amane?”

“Oh—yeah, of course she’d want to change too, Christ. Sorry for leaving her out.”

“No, I meant would you want to look like her.”

“Oh. Uh—” I was aware Hina had dodged the question, but I figured we might as well address the last Radiance. “Her hair’s really nice.”

“Mm,” Hina agreed, reaching up to run her fingers through my hair. “You jealous?”

“Uh. A little, now that you say it. Hers is so…well-maintained.”

“You can do that too, y’know. Everything she uses is off the shelf.”

“Yeah, but—” I floundered for a moment, trying to find a less plaintive way to express my objection, then gave up. “It’s work.”

“But you’ll look so good.”

I didn’t have a rebuttal to that. I reached for the keyboard again.

ezzen: Okay, uh, maybe Amethyst too? Human form, not mantle. So something between her and Hina? Specifically hips and hair, if I had to name specific features?

starstar97: hmmmmm

starstar97: fem bone structure, long hair (in your bizarre anime orange), not much in the way of boobs

starstar97: and of course carapace right

ezzen: I thought this was about the Radiances?

starstar97: only as a baseline

starstar97: one sec

“Heh,” Hina chuckled. “She’s got your number.”

“She’s known me a lot longer than you have,” I pointed out.

“Sure, yeah, true. But I love you more!” She wriggled upward to plant a kiss on my jaw. “Glad you got rid of the stubble, BTW, you look better without it. More kissable, too. A little sad I wasn’t the one to burn it away, though.”

“Sorry?”

“Make it up to me in bed.”

I’d had a good streak of staying calm-faced despite our proximity so far, but that’s what finally broke me. I reddened. “Uh?”

“Later, later. You’re busy, right?”

I blinked, realizing I had been supposed to resume work on mantle stuff at least twenty minutes ago. “Oh, shit, I gotta get back to work.”

Before I could make good on that, Star sent an image. It was of an anime girl, with orange hair in twintails like Yuuka’s, but with no such voluptuous chest—a milder figure, closer to Amane’s, clearly delineated by the skintight red suit she wore. Spandex, maybe, and clearly high tech. I found the word after a moment—a plugsuit, hugging her hips and waist and leaving nothing yet everything to the imagination. On those hips her hands rested, and she bore a smug expression.

I didn’t recognize the character, being relatively unplugged from anime culture despite the company I kept, but my anime-inspired girlfriend did. She cackled.

“Oh my god, she’s right, you wanna be Asuka Evangelion. Ha!”

I squinted at the anime girl, then frowned. “No I don’t. I never specified I wanted to keep the neon hair!”

“Neon Hair Ezvangelion,” she whispered.

“And a plugsuit is not armor!”

—

I kicked Hina out because she couldn’t stop laughing and I had to get back to work. She accepted the ejection easily, telling me through her giggle fit that she’d come back later to retrieve me for dinner and to “get in the fucking mantle,” which was a reference I had to look up once she left the room. Apparently, she planned to gather the whole team for a pre-mission dinner, which would also save me the trouble of hunting down all of the participating Radiances to individually work with them on patch implementations.

As I proceeded through the integration work on the mantle patch, accounting for the subtle differences in tuning between the control circuitry of each girl’s lattice-manifest body, I got a better picture of how my own mantle might come together. Star’s thought experiment was useful for defining the aesthetics I wanted, which were admittedly the main point of wanting a mantle at all. We kept chatting as I worked.

starstar97: idk i think i was on the money

ezzen: With her figure? Sure. But twintails are girly.

I was slightly less cross with Star for bringing the anime character up in the first place than I was with Hina. In the privacy of the one-on-one direct message, I could admit that “Asuka” was a useful metric for honing in on the look I wanted.

starstar97: amethysts hairstyle then?

ezzen: Or something like that. That was pretty much how my new hair looked when I got it, anyway

starstar97: what changed

ezzen: Uh

ezzen: Haven’t really been brushing it so it’s kind of tangly now

starstar97: !!!!

starstar97: SHAME

starstar97: will be a little moot either way though if the mantle becomes your default i guess

ezzen: That’s probably a while away even if I had the exact design ready right now .-.

starstar97: yeah but its a GOAL

starstar97: and like

starstar97: one you can actually make progress toward

This was a touchy subject for Star.

ezzen: Sorry

ezzen: Your situation fucking sucks.

starstar97: IT DOESSSS

starstar97: airlift me to tokyo /j

starstar97: /hj actually. pls

starstar97: then at least id be able to grow my fucking hair out

starstar97: fuck this fucking country

Star was living as a man, because the alternative was at minimum being fired from her job and likely actual danger to her life. She loathed it, but lacked the means to escape, and it was frustrating beyond belief.

But that was only half of the unfairness. Even if we could rescue her, bring her to a place where she had the safety and resources to transition to the greatest extent possible, she was still bound by the limits of science and medicine. No mantle for her, no magical full-body replacement like what Alice had undergone. It shouldn’t have to be this way.

It didn’t have to be this way, I realized.

ezzen: I’ll see what I can do.

ezzen: That’s a promise.

starstar97: wut

starstar97: send sapphire to kidnap me too pls??

ezzen: Uhh well I can’t quite promise that, but I also want to like…ACTUALLY follow through on magical transition stuff for regular people. Not fair that it’s an option for me and not for you.

starstar97: oh

starstar97: holy shit yeah thatd be rad if you can find the time and.. permission or whatever you need

starstar97: can todai, like, actually back that

ezzen: I hope so.

Privately, I thought they likely would, at least if we could collectively find the time for research once everything cooled down. It wasn’t a problem of resources, at least—the challenge was mostly one of magical theory.

starstar97: your transition comes first though

starstar97: let me know if you want to brainstorm more stuff for the mantle, asuka

ezzen: argh

I sent that message with a smile, though, and a weird sense of power, a feeling I could do some good beyond what lay in my immediate surroundings.

Star was right, though: mantle work did come first. I minimized the chatroom and set about the fresh challenge of integrating the changes I had designed. I had to get this done by tonight.

—

Dinner went awry.

The Radiances trickled into the penthouse’s common area one by one. Hina was already there, of course, surrounded by a growing pile of used dishes and intermediate ingredients as she concocted a meal to nourish all of us for the long night ahead, even though only three would actually be heading out. I made to join in with the preparation, but she waved me off and insisted I just go sit down and wait; for this dish, apparently, two cooks was too many for the kitchen.

Honestly, that was frustrating; the looming deadline of tonight’s mission made me antsy to do something and help out. I’d gotten the mantle patches done, at least as far as I could within the purely abstract realm of a GWalk file. The next step was for the Radiances to make the changes themselves, and that had been designated as an after-dinner activity, and that couldn’t happen until dinner was done, so I wanted to help with dinner. But Hina had a process, and I wasn’t to interfere.

I instead took a seat at the low table, in the position facing the windows that was apparently becoming my designated spot, and filled the time by continuing to work on my own tentative mantle designs on my phone, purely at the brainstorming and planning level. It was beginning to dawn on me just how complex of a project this was; all I’d managed to do so far was just lay out the most basic skeleton, the framework that said “this is a body made of LM;” the control circuitry was a placeholder, and all the physical details of appearance were locked behind making a scan of my body to use as a starting point.

I put my phone down at the elevator’s characteristic ding, too embarrassed to share or even risk exposing what I was working on. Alice trudged out the elevator, headed straight for one of the sofas, and made it about halfway through opening her laptop to continue working before Hina appeared next to her and snatched the device from her lap.

“No overtime!”

Alice silently accepted the intervention, rubbing her forehead where her not-horns definitely weren’t growing, and splayed herself out face-down on the sofa instead, her tail rising up from her butt like a pale mound and draping off the furniture’s edge in a way that didn’t seem great for her back.

I glanced at Hina with some concern, who shrugged, unworried.

“She’ll be recharged by the time we eat, just let her rest.”

“If you say so.”

Yuuka was next, heralded first by a dull, thrumming roar coming from outside the window, then by a soft thump overhead as her jetbike touched down on the rooftop landing pad, then by the footsteps of her trotting down the stairs to the upper level to take off her shoes, jacket, and accessories. By the time she came into view, she’d stripped down to just a long, high-waisted skirt and an undershirt, much less adorned than other outfits I’d seen her in. She was pulling off her adhesive eyepatch as she sniffed the air.

“Gyuniku?”

“Bulgogi, yeah, but not beef for you,” Hina clarified. “You’re getting those shredded soy-meat things. How were classes?”

Yuuka ignored the question except for a mild grumble as she descended the last flight of stairs to our level and crossed the room to the loveseat next to Alice’s couch, apparently unwilling to make small talk with her teammate. She had words for me when she sat down, though.

“Something about mantle upgrades?”

“Uh, yeah, just making sure Takagiri’s swords don’t mess with your—”

“I don’t want ya fucking around with my body,” she interrupted. She said it with a growl, but a halfhearted one, like it was coming from a place of obligation more than real hostility. “But it’s not like you can slip anything in there without me knowing, I guess.”

“I mean…yeah, you’re the one who has to implement it,” I managed, a little unsure what kind of tone this conversation was supposed to have. Was I supposed to be offended? “Hina said we’d get to that after dinner.”

“No, you stupid cunt, I’d know because of the…” she began to point at her eye, then just gave up and groaned. “Whatever.”

Alice grunted from the sofa. “Yuuka, you don’t actually hate him. Save your energy.”

The Heliotrope Radiance physically recoiled from the mild rebuke, but didn’t argue against it. Alice hadn’t even deigned to raise her head.

Silence stretched onward for a time, growing more oppressive and cloying the longer it sat, like once-fresh mayonnaise left for too long in the fridge. Yuuka and I both retreated to our respective phones until the elevator announced its return with another ding. Amane stepped out, Ebi right by her side.

She looked good, all things considered. She’d clearly not just rolled out of her medical bed to meet us; her long hair was damp, and she seemed in good spirits as she joined the rest of us with a steady stride and plopped herself down in the loveseat next to Yuuka in much the same way Hina had sat with me in my room, though the plush chair had a little more space to share between them. Yuuka visibly brightened with her friend so close by, and the two girls tittered at each other quietly in Japanese, saving me from the awkward distance. Ebi took up her post over her charge’s shoulder.

[Direct Message] ebi-furai: hows your hand?

I gave her a questioning look, though I wasn’t really one to complain if she’d rather talk via text.

ezzen: Fine? Takagiri’s thing was just localized. Is she doing alright?

ebi-furai: no.

I winced.

I spent the next few minutes idly working on my prospective mantle’s diagram on my phone while we waited for the last Radiance to arrive and for dinner to be ready. As the minutes dragged by, it became harder to ignore how hungry I was; I’d mostly forgotten to eat today, and bulgogi was one of those foods that announced its presence loud and clear, filling the air with garlic, ginger, sesame, and everything good in the world. My stomach rumbled as I shifted in my seat—and Hina must have heard it despite being surrounded by sizzling pans, because she half-turned her head to fix me with a sapphire side-eye of concern. 

“Dinner’s ready!” she called with a wink. The announcement drew the others to take their usual spots around the table as she started plating up piles of grilled meat and veggies over rice. Alice rose from her not-quite slumber, rubbing her forehead and eyes as she folded her legs under herself. Yuuka and Amane extricated themselves from the chair. But as Hina began to distribute our meals, one of us was still missing.

“Somebody needs to go get her,” Yuuka opined.

“Might have lost track of the time,” I agreed. “Especially if Takagiri isn’t doing great.”

Alice, slightly zombie-like after her power nap, glanced at Ebi. “Well?”

The android shrugged, the interlocking teal plates of her shell shifting hypnotically with the motion. “Am I my mother’s keeper?”

“Yes,” chorused Alice, Hina, and Yuuka.

“Fair enough. She’s already in the elevator.”

Satisfied with that answer, everyone finished settling in at their spots at the table. There seemed to be a silent agreement that nobody was to begin eating until all had arrived, which overrode the growling of Alice’s stomach and my own, despite the tempting, alluringly steaming dish placed right in front of me. We waited a few more seconds in silent anticipation.

Right before the elevator dinged, Yuuka scrambled to her feet. “Aw, cunt.”

The elevator announced one last arrival. A grinding ache crept into my hand, and for a moment, I shared Yuuka’s prescience. Amane’s sharp intake of breath told me she did as well. The elevator doors slid open, and there was Ai—with Takagiri in tow.

Overlapping voices broke into a cacophony, with Yuuka’s rising above all the others.“What the fuck are you thinking?”

Author’s Note:

Beneath the combined gender onslaught of Hina and Star, it was practically inevitable that Ez would end up at Evangelion. Perhaps with a little more time, he may pick an actual magical girl instead! But the gender exploration must go on hold for now; there’s always some new bullshit in the penthouse. As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

Another week means another poster of the Radiances by Mjeow! This time it’s Hina my belina. This was actually the first commission in the series, but it made more sense to put it on this chapter where she’s actually onscreen.

Also, it’s pride month, so I’m trying to get some art done of some of our lesbians. Based on a poll in the Discord, that looks like it’ll be Alice and Amane, so we’ll finally have some couple art for them.

If you have a RoyalRoad account, please consider taking thirty seconds to leave a five-star rating on the story over there.

Sunspot is taking its first regular break of the arc! I’ll be working on my submission for the RR contest, which involves a whole lot of dragons; an unreasonable amount, frankly. Sunspot will return on Friday, June 20.

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

Join the Patreon to support the story and read chapters three weeks ahead of public!

May 18, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

Unreality

If one were told that there was something in the corner by someone running on a life-threateningly severe sleep deficit, most rational people would find it easy to dismiss. But Takagiri was a flamebearer, and things are often weird for us, especially when it comes to what we see. The eyes are the window to the soul, after all. So, just to be on the safe side, the first thing I did was yell.

“EBI!”

This didn’t actually summon Ebi like a spirit from the ether; as far as I was aware, she was still up on the eighteenth floor, and we were in the basement, and it still took time to traverse the space between. However, she was hooked into all the CCTV cameras, the PA system, and, let’s face it, probably also my phone. In a split second, she heard me, reviewed the footage, and relayed my panic to Ai. Moments later, the Emerald Radiance charged through the door to join us.

She entered with superhuman physicality, nearly shoving the door off its hinges and launching from the threshold to right in front of us in what felt like a single step. The tattoo on her back was aglow, softly shining through the fabric of her ratty tank top in most places but retina-piercingly bright where it peeked out at her shoulders and the base of her neck. The emerald ink burned near lime as the Radiance stared at the corner Takagiri had indicated.

“Ebi says there’s nothing on the cameras. Izumi-san?”

Takagiri replied in Japanese, sounding unsure enough that it was clear she was saying something along the lines of “I think I’m hallucinating.”

Ai nodded and materialized something into her hand—a pair of what looked like snowboarding goggles, its lens reflecting the room in blue. She pulled it onto her head and stared into the corner.

“Nani mo nai.”

“J—just a hallucination, then?” I asked, uncertain. My non-existent hackles were raised—removed though they were by blood magic—and my skin crawled with the insistence that something was there, despite all evidence to the contrary. I forced myself to relax, trying to focus on the exceedingly awesome tech Ai had whipped out. “What do the goggles do?”

I knew the answer, of course, but this was a self-distraction tactic to force some normality onto the spookiness, not genuine interest.

“Ripple visualizer.” She pulled the headset off and checked the top edge of the padded rim for something. “A little red and pink in the walls, but that’s just Ebi.” She put the goggles back into her pocketspace, apparently satisfied, but cast a suspicious glower at the creepy corner just to verify, as though her unmodified meat-eyes might reveal something the ten thousand-dollar detection equipment hadn’t.

Takagiri, for her part, was alternating between doing the same and rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Kieta,” she muttered. “Gone.”

Ai nodded, at last willing to turn her back on the empty corner and face us. “I’m going to call it a hallucination. Izumi-san, mou daijoubu nano?”

Takagiri nodded several times, a small, jerky, repetitious motion that seemed to be more to reassure herself than to reply to Ai’s question. She muttered something in response, then said it again in English.

“I don’t want to be here.”

“Okay. Ezzen, save what you’re working on, and let’s go somewhere else—my office.”

“Huh?” I blinked. “Oh, yeah, sure.” I scooted my chair back in to reach the keyboard.

As my hand wrapped around the mouse, I felt something wrong. The joints of my fingers ached. That wasn’t the most uncommon thing in the world, but it was usually a product of the weather, and it simply wasn’t cold enough in here for it. And as far as I knew, the only other thing that caused my hand to ache like that was—

“Red ripple.” I turned to Ai and raised my makeshift ripple detector.

She understood my meaning immediately and pulled out the goggles again, tugging them over her head in a hurry, ignoring how the strap caught her ponytail against her head. She frowned. “Nothing.”

As she turned back to me and Takagiri, though, she froze and sucked in a breath. Takagiri looked woozy, blinking repeatedly, and was wobbling on her feet. The ache in my fingers spread to the stump of my foot as Ai and I realized simultaneously that Takagiri was the source of the ripple. Ai reached out and grabbed her wrist, and Takagiri jerked to wakefulness with a scream. She looked around, crazy-eyed and terrified, as though not remembering where she was. 

The pain in my hand spiked to a boiling throb as Takagiri locked eyes with Ai—then began to ebb away as she shuddered and sagged against the wall. She sank into herself, heaving sobs of terror that pulled at my heart. Ai immediately dropped to one knee to console her while I stood there, awkward and unsettled. I wanted to help—but first, I wanted to get the hell out of this room. I turned and cast one more wary glance at the corner that had started all this; still empty. Ai noticed and asked Takagiri something, presumably whether she still saw anything. She shook her head slowly, nonverbal.

We cleared out anyway. I spent the next minute still awkwardly standing there while Ai coaxed Takagiri to her feet, encouraging and soothing, with all the protective care of a big sister despite being easily twenty-five years younger than the Hikanome leader-assassin. As she finally convinced her to get up, the Emerald Radiance shot me a glance full of worry and suppressed panic.

We were running out of time.

Ai took Takagiri to the prosthetic fitting room to make sure she was alright—even aside from the psychological effects of whatever she’d dreamt in that micro-sleep, spilling out that much red ripple just by existing was never good. I would have come along, but this wasn’t my specialty; my way of helping Takagiri lay in helping the Radiances bring Sugawara to justice and end his nocturnal assaults on her mind, and that meant I had to keep working on the mantle patch.

I awkwardly wished them luck and returned to my room to keep working, hurrying to get as far away from the creepy encounter as I could. That meant another trip back down the basement hall, some time going up the elevator, and a half-hobbling walk across the landscape of beanbag chairs that made up the upper-level common area. The whole time, I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting yet hoping not to see…something. Sugawara’s ghost, I suppose. By the time I returned to my room, my nerves had settled somewhat, and once I threw off my shoes, disengaged my prosthetic, curled up in the big, padded chair Ebi had gotten me, and booted up my PC, I felt better. At least now I had something else to focus on.

It was wonderful to have my own proper workstation again, and this one was far in excess of anything I’d had access to previously. With three monitors, I had more screen space than ever before; no more splitting my single screen to have a too-cramped GWalk session on the left half and various documentation on the right, or being forced to tab between them for the luxury of full-width windows. Instead, I now had a full, high-resolution screen of GWalk on the center display, all the documentation I needed on the left, and the right monitor gave me space to always be able to see the chatroom. It occurred to me that I could maybe rotate that monitor to a vertical position to have the chatroom on top and something for music on the bottom, but that was a project for later.

Takagiri had given me enough theory to go off of; the swords were straightforward, and I had a solid picture in my head of how they damaged the mantles, so from there, patching the vulnerability in each mantle’s diagram was only two steps: modify the relevant mechanisms and make sure I hadn’t broken anything downstream in the process. The core of the first step was to address the leak on the gyroscope; Takagiri had briefly described the necessary changes for that, so I knew where I was headed.

The gyro assembly as implemented in the Radiances’ mantles was a gyroscope in name only, with no actual mechanical, electronic, or optical assemblies like you’d see in an aircraft. Instead, the same function was achieved with an {ALIGN}:4-{DIFFERENTIATE} block, which was a cheap, high-resolution way to determine which direction was up as well as account for rotational changes by just multiplexing the four spatial cardinal directions and checking for changes in orientation. It was a standard implementation for when precision was important; in this case, to ensure a clean interface with the senses of the piloting Radiance, because a misalignment between their internal sense of orientation and the mantle’s actual position would render the magical construct basically uncontrollable.

In most contexts, the small amount of free pink ripple exuded by this approach was negligible; within the information-altering domain of pink ripple, the particular effect of this leak would usually just pigeonhole into some minor color distortions on nearby photographs, or maybe key changes in music if there happened to be any. But Takagiri’s swords, and any other anti-mantle weapons wielded by other Sugawara loyalists using the same principle, were specifically designed to use this free ripple to damage the gyroscope upstream in the chain and, from there, mangle a bunch of other systems downstream, so this ripple had to be addressed. It was essentially a cyberattack—leak, vulnerability, exploit. So I needed to make a patch.

I could have replaced the gyroscope assembly wholesale with another approach—an LM imitation of a physical gyroscope would be fun to model and wouldn’t have this problem—but that would require testing, which GWalk couldn’t do for this sort of sensory and psychomotive interfacing, not without some extra magical hardware or directly asking one of the Radiances to implement it. And we were still on a time budget here; a full teardown and replacement of a core component of the mantle—which might not even work correctly—was unacceptable when we had maybe twelve hours. Besides, there was a simpler solution: I could just turn the pink ripple into another color with a glyph that could take the color and do something safer and more predictable with it.

Red ripple was right out, obviously, given Amane’s particular vulnerabilities—and nobody save Hina would want their mantle to produce pain as a side effect where not absolutely necessary, nor other sensory effects that would be just as bad for controllability as the aforementioned gyroscope misalignment. Green was similar—coming from an LM construct rather than an organic body, it couldn’t be trusted to reliably pigeonhole into something non-biohazardous for bystanders. Besides, almost none of the glyphs for that color took pink inputs predictably; that was one of the big issues with biomancy.

Orange, the color of ripple concerned with space and distance, was also a no-go. Orange glyphs tended toward spatial distortion, like pocketspaces or the fourspace storage mechanism for the mantles, as well as a bunch of weaving utility glyphs like multiplexers and tension modulators; control flow, in programming terms. Since the actual implementation of all these diagrams was literally weaving Flame through physical space, arbitrarily routing free ripple into orange was almost always a bad idea because it could mess up the whole lattice. Silver and white had no glyphs; they were theoretical models for phenomena more than anything else—barring Yuuka and Miyoko, both of whom interfaced with them glyphlessly. I still didn’t have a clue how.

So, that left blue, the set of glyphs concerned with kinetics and entropy. I could vent energy as heat or alpha radiation or various kinds of kinetic ‘kicks’, all of which were helpful in some situations. In this case though, for the constraints of the mantles’ function and concerns about collateral damage, the obvious and most widely used candidate was {SEVER}. In the diagram, I stuck it in right after the {DIFFERENTIATE}, and a little tinkering with tension and orientation gave me what I was looking for.

What were we severing? The water vapor in the air. Being able to break hydrogen from oxygen was an enormously important process for modern power generation, one of the key ways that magitech had changed everything at an industrial scale—but for this application, I only cared about getting rid of the pink ripple, and {SEVER} was elegant because it was no awkward kinetics, no heat, and no radiation—just hydrogen and oxygen into the surrounding air, and in fairly negligible quantities.

Implementing these changes was a lot of dragging, dropping, changing numbers in boxes, hitting “Build,” and tweaking the numbers again until everything worked how I wanted it to. The {SEVER} had to lead into the rest of the mantle, like the {DIFFERENTIATE} had originally, so it was important that it didn’t mess with the pink signals that were actually being used, only the leakage we were trying to get rid of. This was something GWalk could optimize for me, with the right constraints in place, but I still felt obligated to give everything an eyeball check.

The downstream effects were slightly different across each of the three mantles I was working on; the gyroscope module was the same, but in Hina’s mantle, it also fed the fourth dimensional position and rotation data directly to her neural link, since her mutated brain could take it, and that needed some extra work to integrate. By contrast, Alice and Yuuka’s mantles had intuitive controls for movement in the third dimension, but they had to traverse the w-axis via instrumentation. I wondered what it would take for me to also be able to freely and naturally move through the fourth dimension the way my girlfriend and the Vaetna could. I’d been helpless when trapped outside reality—locking onto my spear to return to Earth had been a clever bit of magic, but conditional, and it hadn’t been as automatic as just stepping kata-ward back home. I wanted that freedom.

I also wanted to take a break now that the broad strokes of the solution were in place. For the first time in two hours, I relaxed my focus on the GWalk window and datasheets and diagrams and sat back in my chair, letting my other senses and awareness of my surroundings seep back in. My neck hurt, for one; I’d been sitting too far forward. I twisted it this way and that, looking for a satisfying crack, but got none. Instead, I was alarmed to find that my usual range of motion had expanded; I could turn my head well past my shoulder without discomfort; more of the changes to my flexibility that I’d seen previously.

“Hm.”

I experimentally unfolded my legs from under me and hefted my right shin in my still-weak arms. I lifted my foot to my chest easily, knee and hip swiveling easily to accommodate the motion. I went even higher, until my heel touched my chin.

“Wow.”

Giddiness swept through me. It wasn’t super strength, or speed, or four-dimensional freedom, but it was still unmistakable proof that I’d been altered, mutated beyond the old boundaries of my humanity, becoming something more. We really had to document these more properly with Ai once she was less busy trying to keep Takagiri alive.

I took the giddiness with me to the chatroom, pulling it over to my main monitor. It had been buzzing along to my right throughout the process, but mostly fallen outside of my attention as I had become engrossed in the engineering task. Now, though, it was time for a proper check-in. Early afternoon in Japan was late evening for the Americans, and many of us kept poor sleep schedules, so it was pretty active around now. Unfortunately, this meant I happened to walk directly into a topic that was rather close to home.

starstar97: this kind of speculation doesnt help anyone. the official statement from hikanome put it very clearly, they’re not gonna pursue legal recourse, and todai’s paying for everything

ks3glimmer: that doesn’t absolve sapphire of responsibility! she attacked thousands of civilians, and hundreds of them are going to have long term ripple sickness. there have to be consequences beyond just paying fines. that was barely an apology

Glimmer was at it again, I saw, rapping my fingers on the keyboard as my good mood soured; a mild benefit to my sharp reduction in chatroom presence since coming to Todai had been that I hadn’t had to put up with much of their direct, combative nature. Apparently, my luck had run out, and at an especially poor time: Hina’s official televised apology had just concluded. Twenty minutes ago, according to the clock. I hadn’t wanted to watch it anyway, not when I basically already knew what she was going to say. She’d apologized to me already, after all, and promised to do the same with her teammates. Though based on how my conversation with Alice had gone, I wasn’t sure if she’d actually gotten around to it yet.

At any rate, since the televised apology had taken about twenty minutes, and had ended twenty minutes ago, that meant Star had been acting as Hina’s lawyer here in the chatroom for forty minutes; a noble but unenviable task given that Glimmer seemed intent on painting my girlfriend in as poor a light as possible. Sometimes, I wondered why Sky even let such a combative person stick around.

I decided to intervene, mindful to not make Star’s life any harder by accidentally incriminating Hina further.

ezzen: Hey.

moth30: oh its the uh

moth30: ezzen of the hour

My brow furrowed ever so slightly. I liked the gender-ambiguous turn of phrase, but the message itself felt slightly ominous.

starstar97: hi ez

ezzen: Hi. Anything going on other than the apology?

This did not work.

ks3glimmer: hi ezzen

ks3glimmer: whats your take on sapphire, as someone who lives with her

ks3glimmer: i remember you saying she kinda freaked you out?

“Fuck,” I groaned. I’d forgotten that, as far as the chatroom was concerned, I had a fairly negative relationship with Hina, one characterized by the discomfort I’d felt in the first few days with her, when she’d been feeling me out and courting me via repeated intrusions on my personal space. Summarizing my swing from that state of affairs to the current mess of our relationship simply wasn’t going to be possible without breaking opsec; my fingers hesitated on the keys as I tried to figure out how to express how things had changed.

Fortunately, the rest of the chat also felt that Glimmer’s pivot was uncalled for.

moth30: dont be hounding them, glim

moth30: probably kind of a nightmare in lighthouse right now and trying to make ez of all people incriminate them is just unfair

thanasen: ^

thanasen: ngl ive kinda forgotten ezzen was even there

thanasen: might go refresh on that

thanasen: but yeah, lets drop it here

thanasen: slow day in the lab here

ks3glimmer: -_- i dont feel what i said was particularly out of pocket but sure

ks3glimmer: its not like ebi-furai ever talks about what its like working there so i was just wondering

The others were quick to insist on the change of topic.

starstar97: im good! work sucked but i got pizza

moth30: chillin. you missed the other day’s stream, right?

ezzen: uhh

Five seconds of googling later, I figured out what he meant: there had been a Vaetna stream two days ago, while I was out cold, finishing up the work that had been happening the day I’d been flametouched a few weeks ago. I became a little upset at myself for missing it; three weeks ago, I’d not have dreamed of missing a single Vaetna stream, to such an extent that they had defined my sleep schedule. It was upsetting that I was falling out of touch with the circles that had made up my whole life, even though my actual, material conditions had come much closer to realizing my dream of becoming a Vaetna.

Then again, this time wasn’t really my fault.

ezzen: Was out cold, sorry.

moth30: lmao you don’t need to apologize for surviving

moth30: nice hair btw

moth30: why the change? (if thats a comfy topic)

Oh. Right. Even though my new hair had been a steady weight on my head and shoulders, I’d barely given it any thought and had mostly forgotten it was there—I hadn’t even looked in a mirror since the morning of the barbecue. The orange strands, which had begun their lives as a perfectly laminar curtain of dark LM, were now starting to get tangled and messy, as was inevitable when it was long enough to go down my back. I didn’t actually know how to manage that—just brush it in the shower? I wondered if I could avoid asking the Radiances about it and learn entirely through YouTube. Though the idea of Hina helping brush my hair in my spacious shower was…I shook it off.

More importantly, Moth’s message was a reminder that everyone had seen my new hair. My stomach lurched as I thought of all the Hikanome members holding up their phones, recording me and Yuuka opening the tunnel, and then all the drama at the end of our fight with Takagiri. It was global news—which meant my ill-gotten hairstyle had been immortalized on camera and seen by millions. This would have been bad enough in itself, but everyone also knew that the hairstyle was new, since I’d been caught on camera briefly during my escape from the PCTF. I had mostly been a dark lump in the short, handheld video, but that was enough to indicate the change from brown to neon orange, from neck length to back length.

But it was a change I didn’t hate. Being seen for it felt bad, and it made me feel somewhat exposed, but the actual change of hair was growing on me. And these were my friends. I swallowed and decided to be brave.

ezzen: Thanks. It was an accident, blood magic. I got a haircut I hated and used magic to fix it, then screwed up and changed the color.

starstar97: it looks great!

moth30: ^

starstar97: honestly fabulous while you were fighting, blowing in the shockwaves like that

The compliments made me feel shockingly good, a mixture of relief and just…elation. Was this the rumored gender euphoria? Whatever it was, it was nice. I was a little surprised that seemed to be the sum total of reactions, though. Something compelled me to probe.

ezzen: …No comment on the use of blood magic over glyphcraft?

moth30: even the great ezzen feels the irresistible siren song of unsafe shortcuts

moth30: we’ve all been there

[Direct Message] starstar97: OF COURSE I HAVE COMMENT ON THE BLOOD MAGIC

I tabbed over, relieved she was going with the most direct approach—and was promptly met with the last message I had sent her, the one where I had admitted to her both the act and the fact that it may not have been due to solely Vaetna-related dysphoria. That was probably why I’d felt the need to ask that follow-up question; I’d half-put this out of my mind because it had been right between Alice cracking my gender egg and my dealing with Hina’s moping, and I’d been too physically and emotionally exhausted to check if Star had even seen the message, but some part of me must have remembered that I’d never gotten a reply.

Evidently, Star had not seen the message, and took an uncomfortably long time to follow up. My trepidation slowed the passage of time, far more mundane than when I’d tapped into Yuuka’s silversight but equally glacial, each second feeling like minutes as my best friend composed a response to my gender reveal. I couldn’t take it.

ezzen: pls hit send

starstar97: i see

A too-short message for the time she’d spent typing.

ezzen: …you see

starstar97: HOLY FUCK IM PROUD OF YOU E

starstar97: youre really valid and on the one hand its a little ridiculous that being flametouched and literally joining a magical girl team is what it took to finally crack your egg but on the other hand i know things were really hard and dysphoria haze for you before and im really proud of you for seeing it. thanks for trusting me with this

starstar97: howd it happen, other than haircut? was it like a big moment of realization after the haircut or was it like, cooking over the past couple weeks ever since coming to todai and youre only telling me now that the hair is out of the bag? its fine if thats the case btw, no judgment, i get it. youre way braver than me either way

ezzen: uh

This was a lot at once. “How did it happen” was an insanely loaded question, and one I had to tread cautiously about—as much as I trusted Star, if she knew one of her biggest idols was a trans woman like her, and moreover that Kimura was Takagiri and was therefore also trans, she’d explode. So I employed a little white lying.

ezzen: More like moment of realization, I guess?

I told the story from front to back, beginning with the dreadful, agonizing haircut and ending with where we were now, including the Radiances’ support of me after the haircut but leaving out the revelations at the very end of the inferno and the specifics of my egg-cracking conversation with Alice. Instead, I semi-invented a version of events where I enhanced my body with magic during the fighting—which was true—and that led me to the realization afterward that simply transcending my physical limits wasn’t enough, not in concert with my very strong feelings about my body and facial hair.

ezzen: So yeah, it’s all kind of a big mush of Vaetna transhumanism and, like, not wanting to be male? Or at least not liking a male, human body? I don’t really know yet but I’m trying to figure it out between all the political shit going on over here.

Star had been very polite and refrained from interrupting as I worked through the story, but the moment I sent that message, she pounced.

starstar97: so the radiances knew and now youre out to them. and theyre supportive?

ezzen: Entirely. I know what you’re going to ask next, btw, about trying to get them to help research transition magic in an actual lab and the resources they’ve got. Idk yet.

starstar97: …

starstar97: i mean yeah i WAS gonna ask that but first i was gonna ask about your own plans for transition

ezzen: oh

I hadn’t actually given that any thought—I didn’t even know what my ideal form was, let alone how I’d get there. Star was light-years ahead of me.

starstar97: do they prescribe estrogen over there? is it more of a DIY situation? no way todai couldn’t under-the-table you some, worst comes to worst

starstar97: wait

starstar97: holy shit

starstar97: EZTROGEN

ezzen: :\

starstar97: saving that one for when you come out to the chat in proper

starstar97: (no pressure though!)

ezzen: <3

ezzen: this is a lot

ezzen: Idk anything about transition. Does the word even apply here? All the changes I want can come from my Flame, I hope.

Whatever changes those were.

starstar97: can they

starstar97: thats good then

starstar97: and uhhh maybe you havent thought this far ahead yet buuuuuut

starstar97: whats the over/under on “radiance ezzen”? since you’ve kinda already gone through the gauntlet of a whole inferno event and a fight with them

starstar97: not saying you should identify as a girl and not enby, but uh. you said sapphire said trans radiances were on the table

starstar97: (did you ever figure out what she meant by that, historically?)

I had, but I couldn’t tell Star that. Hell, Hina could have meant either Alice or potentially Sky, and I could divulge neither.

ezzen: I think she was just pushing my buttons. She sniffed me out first.

Despite how close we’d become, I still found myself shuddering at that first encounter with the hyena. She’d clocked me immediately, I realized, in my totality—both transgender and transhuman. Also, the idea of Hina sniffing me in a more literal sense—

I received a ping from the main chat.

thanasen: @ezzen damn ez you’re actually really good looking what the heck

ezzen: huh

A moment later, the attached image loaded—a zoomed in image of my face from when Yuuka and I had made the tunnel.

thanasen: was curious about the hair so I checked some of the videos but even aside from that you’ve actually just got a great face

My heart stopped. Yeah, everyone had seen my hair, because it was impossible to miss the crazy orange even at a distance. But the cameras had also captured my face—shaven smooth, sure, but still immortalized on the internet. They’d seen my face, in detail. My anonymity had been destroyed in full.

They’d seen my face.

Visceral wrongness crashed through me, the same as when the barber’s shears had chopped off my hair. I hated my face; it had become slightly, barely more tolerable to me after I’d forcibly removed all the beard and moustache hair, but it was still wrong. It still didn’t feel like mine, and there was a heart-borne terror at the idea that anybody—everybody—would associate it with me.

The Radiances were one thing, trustworthy, safe, fellow flamebearers; even beyond Alice’s refleshing, they were all well-versed in the art of mask-making, what it meant to separate the private self from the public persona. They had made it literal with their mantles. I had implicitly extended the same grace to the various Todai employees I inevitably encountered in the halls; they were in on the masquerade too, in a lesser sense. But something in me screamed at the idea of being exposed so completely to the world at large, to the masses who would see the meat I called a face and label it Ezzen when it was not.

I needed to cover it up, to replace it with something else, something that was correctly me, the version of me that was right.

My eyes slid back from my second monitor to my first, to the diagram of an entire LM projection of a human body splayed out before me, a fully customizable facsimile. No need for awful, spur-of-the-moment, horrifically bloody and painful sanguimancy this time; I could design the perfect shell, re-establish the distance, the right way, the way I was good at, through lattice-manifest and ingenuity, until the cameras would capture how I ought to look.

I needed to make a mantle.

Author’s Note:

Just a hallucination after all.

Right?

Otherwise a very magic- and gender-heavy chapter, and our first time in the chatroom in a good while! Those of you who have been asking for more complete definitions of the ripple colors and what they do, eat your heart out.

This week’s Radiance poster by Mjeow is of Ai! As a reminder, these artworks are from an in-universe photoshoot for Todai PR, not necessarily depictions of the girls as we and Ezzen are familiar with them. So these are canon but not necessarily their default looks; that cutting insert necklace Ai is wearing is just a prop, for example, and not too much of her work involves her personally using a big ol’ open-ended wrench like this one.

That’s all for this week. As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!

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!

May 14, 2025

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

The next day, Alice finally found the time to sit me down and debrief the events of the Barbecue Inferno. It was a pale day; the clear and cloudless February sky held nothing to occlude the sunlight as it washed the Tokyo skyline into harsh, neutral off-whites, spilling through the east-facing window of the penthouse’s meeting room and onto the table, bright enough to overwhelm the warmer LED bulbs overhead.

The weather was similar to four days ago, when I’d gone to Yoyogi Park and everything had gone wrong. My phone said the temperature was roughly the same too. This time, though, instead of being shielded from the chill by a reality alteration field of incredible breadth and potency, it was the simple floor-to-ceiling windowpanes, a mundane barrier manifested from Todai’s money rather than Hikanome’s Flame.

Alice had called me in for a general review of that day’s events, but I was impatient to find a moment for my own objective: convince Alice that it was a good idea for Hina and I to go hunting together.

“For what it’s worth, I think you did great,” Alice declared.

I shifted in my chair, tracing my burn scars and savoring the warm sun, such a far cry from the abyssal cold. “Uh. Yeah, I guess.”

This debrief saw neither of us at our best; even with her first full night of sleep in four days, Alice still looked a little haggard, and I was still nowhere near a hundred percent. I’d practically collapsed into Amane’s padded chair after being summoned by the Radiances’ leader. I rubbed my nose, which made Alice smile.

“No, really. Both for the scheduled stuff and the crisis management, I’m really happy with you. Amane says you handled Hikanome’s introduction well. And the…well, not quite an argument…debate about the Spire was good enough. Shows you believe in something enough to stand up for it; they care a lot about that. I think you made a good impression.”

“…But?” I wanted her to hurry up.

“No but. You did well, really!” She nodded to emphasize the statement, faltering slightly as her eyes scanned down her laptop’s screen. “Well, we do have some notes for you, but nothing you won’t expect.”

“Notes?”

“Um…well, nothing important enough for us to talk about now. It’s already in your email, actually.”

A new email, a lighthouse.co.jp address they’d provided me in the rush to settle me in prior to my appearance at the festival. I’d actually already had a contact email, but they’d insisted I also have a second one for official communications. I shrank in embarrassment as I remembered I hadn’t been checking it even before the barbecue—nor my usual one, which now surely had hundreds of communiques piled up from fellow academics. Both accounts had slipped through the cracks—work I’d be putting off even further in favor of self-indulgent, bloody activities with Hina.

If I could find a moment to bring it up, that was, and Alice wasn’t giving me an opportunity.

“Don’t worry,” she insisted, mistaking my nervousness for one of my countless other forms of discomfort. “What’s much more important is what happens from now, yeah?”

I nodded. Was this my moment to bring it up? I looked down at my hands, building up the courage.

Before I could commit to it, she went on, sitting forward intently. Her voice changed, a little more hesitant and careful. “The big thing is that although you did great, Hina…”

“Did not,” I finished, drumming a scarred finger on the table with annoyance that I’d hesitated. I tried to segue into my pitch. “No—no need to tiptoe around it with me. I know she fucked up, and she’s got to make it right.” I took a breath. “I’m—”

“Hm!”

Alice’s monosyllabic interruption made me raise my eyes; her eyebrows had gone up. She seemed surprised. “I’m—yes. Yes. Yeah.” She sighed. “It’s honestly quite a relief to hear we’re aligned on that already. After Yuuka said you didn’t end up breaking up…”

I grimaced apologetically. What had been intended as a breakup had instead only redoubled whatever sort of strange bond I had with the sapphire-eyed girl, and Yuuka had not been happy in the slightest to find I was remaining a monsterfucker. But at least I was trying to help keep her accountable—shouldn’t that count for something in even the crystalline, vindictive eye of Heliotrope?

It counted with Opal, at least. She scrolled her laptop with one hand and rubbed her forehead with the other, trying to find her new talk track from her notes now that she knew she didn’t have to convince me of Hina’s guilt. Her eyes glittered beautifully in the sunlight, and I was momentarily caught off guard by just how pretty she was. They were all good-looking, but Alice’s face was practically sculpted—no, literally sculpted, by her Flame, into her image of her ideal self. With some dragon bits regrettably stapled on.

Facial beauty aside, Alice was also…hot. It had somehow become more uncomfortable to admit that to myself now—was I just attracted in the normal sense, or was I really feeling envy? The soup of desire-like feelings was so hard to suss out, even now that I knew the latter option was there. Neither possibility made it right for my eyes to slide down to her chest, though, and I quickly averted my gaze toward the window again.

That was another opportunity wasted by distractions. Alice was the one to fill the silence.

“They want a public apology from her.”

“Yeah. You said that, I think. Yesterday.” I cleared my throat, impatience battling with the more practical need to know what else Hina had to get done to clear her image in the eyes of both Hikanome and her teammates. “Um. That’s it? No new laws or fines or anything?”

I’d known Hina’s actions would have repercussions for her and Todai, of course, but the exact nature was quite murky. When we’d visited Tochou, Alice had hinted that Hikanome could exert significant pressure over them—a public apology seemed awfully light. Admittedly, Todai was in a bit of an odd spot legally; most VNT groups of Todai’s caliber were either more tightly controlled by whatever nation they belonged to, were quasi-religious ‘outside the law’ cults like Hikanome, or were more like states or fiefs in themselves.

Alice shook her head. “Well, I think you already know we’re paying for the damage to the park…and we’re also footing the bill for treatment for those affected by ripple sickness or more direct injury, to the tune of…” her eyes scanned down the spreadsheet. I wanted her to get on with it, even though I was the one who’d asked for details. “We’re still doing spreadsheets for the exact amount. Three or four billion yen, I’d say, to be paid out over the next thirty years. Technically it’s just a big donation to FVI, but I expect Ai will want to be a bit more hands-on in helping out.”

“FVI?”

“Foundation for Victims of Infernos. They’re like the Asian version of the PARC.”

“Ah.” I understood it when she phrased it like that; the PCTF’s Paranatural Aid and Relief Committee was the organization that had paid my welfare and provided my housing in Bristol.

As for the number, I whipped out my phone to convert to a currency I knew, but Alice preempted me.

“Twenty-five million dollars.”

“Jesus.” That was a mind-boggling amount of money to associate with the magical girl sitting across from me. Not much for a major corporation—technically nonprofit in Lighthouse’s case—but it was all effectively Alice’s money, since the others had little interest in the bookkeeping. The casualness with which she tossed around that kind of sum reminded me of just how powerful she was even in a non-magical sense. I spared another glance out the window, reflecting that it was funny how some of the most powerful people in the country lived in a 20-story building and not the 60- or 80-story behemoths surrounding us. An attempt to be humble, maybe. The Vaetna held no such pretensions.

But then, they were the Vaetna.

Alice shrugged when she realized I wasn’t going to continue from my interjection. “It’s the right thing to do. And that’s not all, of course. We’re paying for damages to the park itself—think I said that yesterday—and probably going to bankroll Hikanome’s next similar event. Which isn’t great for our image,” she added as an aside. “But, er, none of this really affects you, I just wanted to assure you that you did well and all of this isn’t your fault. You did commendably before everything turned to shit and made a huge difference after.”

“Even though I was the target and this wouldn’t have happened without me there in the first place.” I couldn’t help but be a little frustrated. I should have called Hina off, or at least checked in with her or something. It was nice to be praised for how I’d done before then, but honestly, that had all taken a backseat in my mind compared to everything that had resulted from what Hina had done. How had the day even begun? I’d been pink and itchy from my impulsive and ill-advised—though still totally worth it—magical epilation, and I’d been confounded by the air temperature bubble, and then Hikanome’s leaders had decided to ambush me—

My thoughts slammed to a halt and my breath caught in my chest as my idle, skimmed recollections of the pre-inferno barbecue brushed up against something I’d somehow almost forgotten.

“My dad. Uh—did I tell you about that?”

“Oh.” Alice blinked, scrolling with the mousepad. “You did, yes. On the phone. But there were bigger matters at the time. You said Miyoko offered necromancy?”

“I don’t… really know what she offered,” I admitted, feeling unsteady. I starkly remembered the disorienting discomfort of the strange space behind her eyes—seriously, what was it with flamebearers and eyes?—but I was having trouble recalling the exact details the trio had given, if any. “His ghost. To learn more about my flamefall. But it’s bullshit, right?”

Necromancy wasn’t real, not in any meaningful sense. It had been demonstrated that bodies could be animated with magitech, but that was just the magical equivalent of making muscles twitch with an electrode, not resurrection, not something with a soul. The idea of a soul in the age of magic was itself a subject of intense debate, and I even privately believed that there was something of the sort, the place where the Flame met its bearer, but the idea that Miyoko could pull my father’s essence back from whatever great beyond it had gone to was still farfetched. And horrifying.

Alice took an uncomfortably long time to answer. She leaned back in her chair and swiveled away from her laptop, turning to face the blindingly bright window and looking out at the skyline. East, I realized, based on the late morning sun.

“Hard to see it in daylight,” she muttered.

East was Tokyo Bay, and in the sky above it, the scar, the grave of where Todai had once fought a Hikanome necromancer.

“Hongo’s…sister?” I recalled dimly. “Failed to bring back her husband. Though ‘failed’ implies there was ever any chance of success. Which there…?”

“Is.” Alice breathed, more grave and careful than a sigh. She turned back toward me, the end of her tail making a soft hiss as it slid along the hardwood. “It’s—Ezzen, you told me when you agreed to join up that you wanted to understand what happened to your father. Miyoko will have answers. Maybe not the right ones.”

My skin crawled. “…You’re not saying it’s bullshit.”

Alice rubbed her face with a hand. No nail polish—too busy, I assumed. She looked at me intently. “I don’t have the energy for this conversation, and I’m honestly not the right person for it. I’ll…when things are a little less stormy, I’ll gather everybody and we’ll have an honest debate about the existence of the soul.” She said it lightly, almost a joke, but there was something uncomfortable in her voice. Her eyes fled back down to her laptop. “More to the point, I’m so sorry they got the jump on you and isolated you like that.”

“Uh. Oh, yeah,” I recalled, accepting the topic change. Whatever Alice was insinuating, it sounded heavy, and I’d had more than enough of difficult conversations in the past 24 hours. “How’d they do that, anyway? Pull the other people out of the car without me noticing?”

I’d almost forgotten that Hikanome’s leaders had isolated me for my audience with them; it had sort of slipped through the cracks since the rest of that day had turned out so insane.

Alice shrugged. “We don’t know exactly. It’s not their first time doing it—but they should know better than to do it to one of us,” she growled. Her brow furrowed. “But Yuuka wasn’t mad about it, I’m told?”

“Uh. No?” Not that I recalled, at least. A little vexed at most.

“Hm. Odd.” Alice typed something into her notes before her fiery irises looked back up at me. Her expression softened from tense and analytical to something gentler. “She’s got a bit of a complex about abductions, especially regarding Hikanome. I’d have thought she’d raise more fuss.”

“Maybe because she doesn’t like me,” I mused aloud.

Alice paused and stared at me. “She likes you a good deal, Ezzen.”

“What?”

My reply made Alice look very tired. “Take my word for it. Back on track,” she waved the topic away, “it sounds like you’re not too rattled about it, either?”

“I’m fine,” I confirmed hurriedly. But even as my mouth moved, a tangential idea was forming. “Wait, if Yuuka should be mad about that, shouldn’t Amane be furious? Being the actual subject of the abduction that kicked all of this off?”

Alice’s shoulders slumped, and I realized I’d stepped on a bit of a landmine. “She’s good at being angry quietly. Let’s just—listen, if you’re fine, then it’s water under the bridge. It has to be, because we’re not really in a position to demand an apology right now.”

“Okay.” After a moment of awkward silence, I added, “Sorry.”

“No worries. As for the offer they made regarding your father—anything else we should know? Timeline? Conditions?”

“Uh.” I racked my brain. The whole encounter felt a bit hazy and dreamlike in retrospect; perhaps that was a clue as to how they’d accomplished it in the first place, and why I’d nearly forgotten it despite how sharp of an emotional punch it had been, both then and just now. “They wanted an answer in…ten days? Though, er, that was before all the stuff with Hina and Takagiri. So I don’t know if that’s changed. Oh, and it was what they wanted in exchange for support against the PCTF.”

Alice nodded as she noted it down. “Bugger. Yeah. You’re going to have to go, if you’re willing.” She raised her eyes to me briefly and I nodded. “Let’s assume the date hasn’t changed, but it’s definitely not the top priority with them right now.”

This was my chance to bring up what I’d discussed with Hina. “Finding Sugawara.”

Alice sat up, squaring her shoulders and looking regal. She met my gaze. “And putting him in the ground.”

I blinked, surprised by the agreement and open declaration of violence. I’d said much the same thing to Hina, but that was Hina, and I’d come into this conversation expecting Alice to preach moderation and realpolitik. But Alice didn’t even sound resigned—there was a determined edge to her voice. She’d abetted our crime at Thunder Horse two weeks ago, after all. Mahou shoujo destroy evil.

That made this so much easier.

“Um, yeah, I agree,” I began, trying to find my footing for the script I’d written in my head. “I mean it just makes sense, right? It’s free real estate when it comes to clearing the air with Hikanome, but even if it weren’t, we’ve got Takagiri’s condition—what Yuuka and Ai put together is really just a stopgap until we at least have him in custody to understand how to break their connection, but that’s sort of half-assing it, isn’t it, because we could just instead kill the fucker and be done with it, right, and there’s also those two missing guys you sent, which let’s face it, probably means they’re already dead, but on the off chance they’re not, we should really go in guns blazing—and, um, Hina and I messed up by keeping my stalker—er, Takagiri—from you and we shouldn’t have, and so we wanted your permission to go after him this time, all above-board, which in hindsight doesn’t really seem necessary now that—hurk—”

“Ezzen! Breathe,” Alice laughed, unable to hold her composure entirely. “Yes, yes, we’re in complete agreement. Save the oxygen,” she giggled. “We’re going after Sugawara, that’s not in question. Hina especially—everyone involved knows she’d do it anyway, with or without permission.”

“Yeah, I meant—” I took another breath, “I meant that we wouldn’t do it without permission. That’s an—an agreement we came to. Yesterday.”

“Mm. When you were supposed to break up, supposedly.” Her voice was non-accusatory, even friendly, and I couldn’t really tell if she was upset or not. “Got her on a leash now, have you?”

“…Yeah.” I didn’t have a defense for that one.

“Thank fuck,” she sighed, then reflexively covered her mouth. “Oops.”

My brow furrowed slightly. I’d heard her curse worse, for one, but also, we were in the middle of planning a murder. That that was less of a violation of her personal code than simple profanity was interesting—and so was the reaction in the first place.

“That bad?”

She sighed. “It’s—well, after something like that inferno, I figured you were either done—with her or with us—or you were really stuck in it now. And I figured the only way you were going to stick around was if you found some leverage over Hina. Glad to see I was right. Last time was Jason, and he just left.”

“Ah.”

“But you’re staying. And you want to be on the front lines now, do you?”

“Well—I can’t much keep her on a leash if I’m not actually there when it counts, can I?”

Alice’s eyes narrowed, and her teeth flashed in a grin, more devious than her usual sunny, polite smiles. “If you want to hunt with her, you can just say it.”

I froze, then sighed.

“Oh my God, yes, thank you,” I admitted. Despite my lengthy ramble, I hadn’t been able to find the courage to phrase it like that. But that was silly—I’d come into this conversation expecting to have to make this pitch to Alice Takehara, the leader of Todai as a political entity, but she was also Radiance Opal, the paramilitary magical girl squad leader and Alice, Hina’s best friend. Of course she was both agreeing to it and reading the intentions behind it accurately. I still felt the need to justify myself, though. “I just—I want to help. I ought to.”

“And we welcome your support. But you’re hardly fit for active duty yet, are you?” She raised a hand and began to count on her fingers. “In the span of twenty-four hours, you ripped all the hair off your skin, got caught in the center of an inferno, overloaded on green ripple, and had a little jaunt through the beyond where you almost froze to death. Plus you’re not even on your final prosthetic yet. And that’s just your physical condition—pardon me for saying so, Ezzen, but you’d not be magically prepared for direct combat even at full physical health. No mantle, no snapweaving.”

“I rewove my foot’s {AFFIX},” I pointed out, but it was a poor shield from the truth; she was right, I wasn’t equipped to go out and inflict bloody retribution in the tradition of the Vaetna. I sighed. “I’m probably better off just sticking around and helping from the chair, eh?”

She nodded. “Right on. I’m not ethically opposed to sending you out there when you’re ready, if that’s what you want, but for going straight after Sugawara, getting our people back, all that? Leave it to your girlfriend; she’s a lot less squishy than you.”

“But she still needs supervision…”

“You don’t need to be right there with her to hold her leash,” Alice chided, smiling. “We’ll send someone with her—Yuuka, hopefully myself as well if I don’t get tied up. And we’re going to move fast—it’ll be tonight, once Hina makes her public apology and Yuuka’s out of classes.”

“Not…right now?”

“Life takes precedence, Ezzen” she sighed. “Doing it today is already rushing it. I want to make sure we’re on the same page as Hikanome first, and honestly, the difference between doing it now and twelve hours from now is pretty minor. I doubt he’s even in that hospital anymore, or Yokohama at all.” She rubbed her forehead. “As for you: help us prep, stay here, hold down the fort. We’ve got several things you could help with today. Do you feel up to it?”

A little nugget of annoyance sprouted in my chest. I’d made it abundantly clear I wanted to help and didn’t need to be babied. I met her eyes with a nod. “Sure.”

“Great. The biggest thing is that Hina, Yuuka, Amane, and Takagiri’s mantles are all wrecked. I’ve got slightly different tasks for you with each of them.”

“Hina’s, too? Oh,” I realized. “Right.”

“Shorn apart when she did her idiotic dive-pounce-thing, as you recall.”

I winced. Yeah, I recalled; the way she’d dyed the entire world blue for a moment wasn’t something to be forgotten easily. “Does she even need it?” I mused aloud. “What with the strength and speed and healing factor? She did fine without it for all of the actual fighting.”

“Not necessarily,” Alice agreed, “so she’s the lowest priority, and probably doesn’t need your help. I’m sure she wants it, though.” She accompanied that with a wink before going on. “But Yuuka does need hers, and it was mangled by Takagiri’s sword. I want you to figure out how that happened, help her repair it, and patch that vulnerability. If there are more blades like that—and I’d bet there are—I want us to not be instantly incapacitated by them this time. Takagiri should be able to help there, of course, if she’s…lucid.”

Takagiri was coming up on her fifth day without sleep.

I nodded nervously. “Uh, yeah. Shouldn’t be too hard even if she’s not; we’ve still got one of the swords and all. How’s she?”

“Not great. Clock’s ticking, but the coffin’s Ai’s job.”

The coffin was a euphemism for the box Ai had pulled out of storage on Yuuka’s recommendation. It was leftover tech from right after Amane’s rescue, back when her red ripple sensitivity had been off the charts and they’d needed to be able to isolate her. With my help, Yuuka had foreseen yesterday that the device—little more than some basic life support and a whole lot of high-power red wards—could be adapted to help shield Takagiri from Sugawara’s nighttime soul-incursions and thereby give her the chance to sleep unmolested.

Ai had been working on modifying it since yesterday—pulling an all-nighter herself, apparently, which I would have joined in had my healing-exhaustion not caught up to me soon after my conversation with Hina. I had been intending to go help her finish it up after I was done here with Alice, but now it sounded like I had other work to do.

“Bit of a grim name, isn’t it?”

“For grim purpose,” Alice conceded. “But like I said, leave that to Ai. As for your part in helping our guest…her mantle was completely obliterated.” She rubbed her forehead again, clearly unhappy with that outcome given what we had learned about our opponent barely two minutes after that. “Obviously, I eventually want you to get it back up and running—she looks miserable in the old guy body, and I can’t imagine that’s helping her mental state. But more pertinently, she can do independent piloting. I’d love to know how.”

“What about the bomb?”

“What about the bomb?” Alice sighed. “We don’t know if it’s even in there. If you do find something attached to her soul, some last-resort horror Sugawara cooked up, then we’ll stop and reassess.”

“Okay. Uh…to recap, fix Hina and Yuuka’s mantles and get a schematic for Takagiri’s.”

“Yes,” she grinned, apparently pleased with my basic recollection. “This is all in your email too,” she added as a not-so-subtle reminder; I winced a little. She glanced down at her own notes again. “I think that pretty much covers it. Uh, Amane’s mantle needs some reconstruction too, and while I’m sure she’s more than capable of dealing with it herself, lend her a helping hand if she asks, would you?”

Something that sounded like resentment had snuck into her voice near the end there; frustration with her girlfriend’s stubbornness? She reached up and touched her forehead yet again, wincing. Always the same place.

Alice caught the direction of my eyes and lowered her hand hurriedly. “Just a migraine.”

“Uh huh,” I replied, an unpleasant theory beginning to form. “You didn’t wind up getting any more dragon-ka, did you? Um—as long as we’re talking about dealing with it yourself,” I explained. “I did offer to help.”

“Nothing,” she said. “If I have a problem, you’d know. Sort of hard to hide the tail getting longer, heh,” she chuckled mirthlessly.

“I meant…horns,” I clarified, tapping my own forehead in the same place she’d been touching.

Alice stared at me. “No. Nope. Not happening. Nope.” She twitched. “You’ve got a lot more urgent stuff on your plate, so just—don’t worry about me, alright?”

“Are you sure—”

“Really, Ezzen, it’s so nice of you to be concerned, but there’s really much higher priority things going on.” She stood abruptly, slamming the laptop closed. “And we’re out of time for now, anyway—I’ve got to run off to meet with Shibuya’s mayor.” She power walked past me and out the door, leaving me alone.

I frowned slightly at Alice’s retreating form as she exited the room. The glimmer of her tail’s scales shifted from reflecting the greyish blues of the outside sky to the warmer indoor lights as she went down the hall. I squinted past the twinkle and tried to assess the draconic limb as a whole, deciding it looked no more massive than usual; I believed her on that front. I just didn’t trust that she’d not undergone any additional transformations from the magic she’d done during the inferno—Yuuka had certainly been worried when she’d punched the tunnel open, and if the precog had concerns, so did I. It stood to reason that Alice’s Flame was lining her up for horns of some sort. Those were plenty draconic, weren’t they?

I hoped I was wrong, of course—more stress was the last thing she needed. I felt bad for even bringing it up, honestly; if I’d known it’d spook her so badly, I wouldn’t have said anything. Stupid. Should have waited for actual evidence.

I tried to put it out of my mind as I lurched to my feet. Foot and a half, really; in theory, I was due to go through the prosthetic designs Ai’s underlings had whipped up, but neither she nor I had the time right now, and honestly, I was much more looking forward to getting some glyphcraft done. Even though I wasn’t going to come along with tonight’s operation, I still had my own part to play, magic to work, mantles to upgrade—starting by reverse engineering Takagiri’s swords.

Thankfully, Takagiri herself was lucid after all. She’d been staving off the ever-encroaching exhaustion by making herself useful, primarily with the coffin itself, but she’d also done me the kindness of actually mapping out how she’d made her swords sometime in the past few days.

We were in another basement room across the hall from Ai’s workshop, a few doors down from the prosthetic fitting room. This one was basically just a computer lab for Ai’s students, maybe thirty computers in three rows of ten. It was empty except for us.

“So it really is pink all the way through,” I muttered. “Hits the control circuitry directly, not the structure.”

“Yes. The parallel {RESONATE} pair here makes the…beginning? The entry on contact.”

“And from there it does a few {INFERENCES}, yeah, and then just hits…” I glanced over at the diagram for Yuuka’s mantle I’d pulled up on the screen. “This part, right? The {ALIGN} before the control manifold. Throws everything out of sync, and then it hits the manifold and…what, crashes the motive connection? Oh, but there’s fallbacks…which don’t land,” I decided, trying to follow the chain of execution in my head. “Or rather, they do kick in, but the gyro module is already done for, so they get the wrong data.” I squinted. “That doesn’t look right.”

“Because it’s not,” Takagiri confirmed, pacing back and forth carefully. She said it helped her stay awake, and who was I to contest that? Her motions were a little jerky and delayed; she looked so bad that it dismissed any residual danger I might have felt around her. She was old and beyond exhausted; in no position to hurt anybody even if she wanted to. But her focus hadn’t wavered, and her voice was steady as she explained. “The gyroscope portion of the manifold leaks pink. Not normally enough to matter, but enough for the sword to overload it. If you fix that, the sword would only cause a momentary interruption.”

I was impressed by her English, at least for this highly technical stuff. I supposed it made sense that if most of the Radiances were fluent in the vocabulary necessary to upgrade, operate, and repair their mantles, then so was she, having effectively copied the design. Maybe it made sense especially for her, since it was—had been—her lifeline to what she considered her true body. How much had she upgraded it, beyond the dual-piloting capability we’d already seen?

“Oh, the gyro. That’s why Yuuka, uh, fell over, and then the control circuitry was all fucked. You’ve already got the fix in your own mantle?”

She nodded. “I just routed the free ripple into {SEVER}. I’m sorry I haven’t recreated the diagrams for the whole mantle. I think if I sit down in front of GWalk for too long, I’ll fall asleep.” As if by nervous tic, she prodded at a patch on her arm—a caffeine drip—fussing with it as if worried the adhesive would come off.

I didn’t really know what to say to that. “Uh. Okay. Yeah, {SEVER} should work,” I affirmed, as I glanced over the diagram of Yuuka’s mantle. If it worked in Takagiri’s, it was good enough for at least this quick patch. “You copied theirs just from observation?” Takagiri didn’t respond, and I looked over at her. “Takagiri?”

She blinked and pressed the patch against her arm more strongly. “Hai—yes.”

“Insane.”

I meant it as a compliment, but she frowned. “I know it’s not normal.”

“Uh—no, I meant I’m impressed,” I clarified. Maybe not the best phrasing to use with somebody slowly losing their grip on reality. “Like, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Maybe a shitty copy of the basic functionality, but not to the same quality, and definitely not with the upgrades you made. It’s not…well, I don’t think ‘normal’ plays into it at all, really. You want what you want, yeah? And from this…you must have wanted it really badly. I—I get that.”

Her eyebrows went up. “You do?”

“Yeah, I mean, like, remaking yourself in the image of something more.”

“Like the Radiances.”

I twitched. “Uh…no. Sorta? But it’s like—not the way you do, I think. The things they’ve got that appeal to me are the things they share with the Vaetna.”

“Not their beauty?”

That brought me to a total halt. “I, uh. I guess? I mean, everybody wants to be attractive, right, and I don’t think most people would mind looking like them.” This was a distinctly uncomfortable topic for me, of course, with how much I tried not to think about how pretty my flatmates were. Even after over a week of acclimating to them, I’d still failed to stop my eyes from wandering between Alice’s most attractive features earlier.

Takagiri paused her pacing and gave me a Look; something between mirth, exasperation, and empathy. She shook her head slowly and emphatically. “No, Ezzen-san, not most people.”

“Oh.” Oh no. “Really?”

“Really. I’m very jealous of them.” She ran her hand over her mouth and flinched at the stubble on her body’s male face. It squeezed my heart. “I made my mantle, let Sugawara do…what he did to me, because I want what they have. The beauty, the youth, the freedom, the…woman-ness. Is there a word for that?”

“Femininity?”

“Femini—femininity,” she repeated, working her way over the repetitious syllables. “Ah, yes, that makes sense. But you came to them without wanting that? Or without knowing you wanted that?”

“I mean, I didn’t have much choice in it.”

“You chose to stay.”

“…Point.” I didn’t like this conversation. “Uh—so just fix the pink leak on the gyro, and your swords—or copies, which I’m assuming Sugawara’s dudes have access to, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation—won’t fuck with the mantles?” I looked at the diagram again. “Well, wouldn’t break them. There’s still the interrupt. Maybe the control circuit needs sheathing.”

“It does. You’re avoiding.”

“Avoiding talking about…gender stuff with you? Being trans? That’s ‘cause—we’re not in the same situation. You want to be like them, sure, that’s your prerogative, but don’t assume I’m the same.”

She raised her hands apologetically. “My mistake. I just thought you’d understand.”

And maybe I did. Maybe I knew exactly what she was talking about. But I didn’t want to talk about it with her—I was far more comfortable talking to the Radiances about this, because…I’d known them a few weeks longer? Just some implicit understanding that had come from living with them? Because they were visibly, irrefutably girls whereas Takagiri was wearing a male face right now? I kicked myself mentally for that last one.

“I…you’re sleep deprived and overreaching,” I declared, trying to separate myself from the conversation by pulling up Alice’s and Hina’s mantle diagrams alongside Yuuka’s to drown the topic under a flood of interesting stimuli for my magic-obsessed brain. “I don’t want to…get into all this until stuff has settled down more.”

I said that instead of “I don’t want to be friends,” which was a bridge too far, unfair, and a little mean. The diagram before me was evidence of her own genius at glyphcraft, and I could acknowledge that, and I did want her as a peer. But she was intruding on an emotional process I wasn’t ready to expose to anyone outside the gaggle of women who’d adopted me, not yet. Besides, she had tried to kill or abduct me a few days ago, and forgiveness only went so far.

Takagiri didn’t say anything in response. I turned to her again, wondering if she was having another sleep-deprived space-out moment—and jumped in my chair at her expression. Her eyes were fixed past me, over my shoulder, peeled wide open. There was terror etched into her face, deepening the lines of middle age into a rictus of awful recognition. My eyes followed her gaze, dragged along, dread and terror building as I saw she was gazing into a far corner, more dimly lit, away from the cold fluorescent lights in the center. From her expression, I was expecting to see a monster perched in that corner, staring us down. My tattoo itched in agreement, and something in the back of my mind was whispering to reach for my Flame, to be ready to snap into action. But there was nothing.

Wasn’t there?

“Takagiri,” I whispered urgently. “Do you see something?”

She said something in Japanese, muttering to herself, then switched to English. She didn’t take her eyes off the murky corner where nothing was. “He’s here.”

Author’s Note:

And we’re back! Thanks for your patience over the long hiatus. This is a bit of a recap chapter and setting the scene for this arc — I’m hoping for this one to be shorter than Arc 2. Ez and the girls have murder on the mind, and can you really blame them?

New thing: I’ve gotten a bunch of commissioned art done over the break (instead of getting an actual cover done for Arc 3, lol)! The first five chapters in this arc will each have a picture of one of the Radiances down here in the author’s note! The theme for these is that they’re official Todai photoshoots/posters, so this is the public’s image of them, not necessarily Ez’s. The first of these is Alice!

Art by Mjeow, who has done absolutely fantastic work on this whole series. View their portfolio and commission sheet here.

All the art in this series will also have textless versions, which I’ll put up somewhere on the site for if people want to download them, as well as some rad alternate versions that will stay Patreon-exclusive for now until I figure out what to do with them. If you’re interested in seeing these available as real, physical posters you can buy as merch, please say so in the comments or on the Discord — I’m interested in opening a shop for that sort of thing, but I won’t know if people are interested unless you say so. That’s it for these for this week!

Unfortunately lighthouse.co.jp is claimed by another company in our real-world timeline, so I can’t do any funny bits with it, like redirecting it here. Oh well.

As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter! We recruited three new betas over the break: Altrune, mirrormatch, and Enigma, and they’ve done a great job.

That’s all for this week! It’s great to be back. See you next Friday!

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May 6, 2025