CONTENT WARNINGS

Body horror, sexual assault mention

The prevailing truth about warfare in the age of magic is that ripple is very versatile and humans, even flamebearers, are delicate bags of blood and organs. Even without my level of glyphcraft knowledge, one needs no imagination at all to list off five or ten ways to fatally disrupt the machinery of a human body; there’s just so many different things to crush or sever or scramble or oxidize or displace. Heart, brain, spinal column. And unlike firearms, most of these methods don’t care one whit about body armor or even cover, provided they can locate you accurately. That was why the Radiances had me train with a balloon: how to kill a person at ten paces with a flick of my fingers.

Defense was stuck playing catch-up. External wards could convert incoming ripple into much less harmful effects or even actively harness it for a counterattack, but the intricacies of pigeonholing glyph interactions meant you had to hedge your bets for anything small enough to be man-portable. Internal wards could keep your heart from exploding and your blood from turning to coconut water, but did so via a form of stasis that the human organism could not tolerate indefinitely. Dimensional and infomantic measures, orange and pink respectively, could disrupt targeting. Armor significantly helped reduce the strain on direct kinetic wards to turn away physical attacks, since it wasn’t like firearms had gone anywhere, though even with all the advances in military-grade material science there was only so much you could carry before it began to hinder movement.

Combine all of these methods in a way that covers each others’ weaknesses and you will end up with a PCTF exo-suit, the closest thing you could reasonably get to a supersoldier without making the soldier themself any more super: durable enough to survive the ripple munitions of modern warzones and the panicked wild magic of a freshly minted flamebearer alike. Invest more resources and you will refine the idea into smaller form factors, using pocketspaces both to store hardware and provide substantial dimensional interference to stop things from even reaching the wards. These were favored by special forces and VIPs and constituted the low end of what you could expect any well-known flamebearer to be equipped with in public.

Go further still. Allot nearly an entire flamebearer’s worth of Flame per unit to make the suit out of pure lattice-manifest; pull the human out of the suit entirely and cloister them in an even more durable personal fortress in a dimension most weapons couldn’t even reach; control it with direct telemetry featuring the most sophisticated interference countermeasures ever designed. Do all that and you would arrive at a Radiance’s mantle. 

Such technology was far beyond overkill for mere personal protection of the young women of Lighthouse. Officially, those capabilities were for diving into infernos unscathed, and unofficially, they were superweapons meant to intimidate any magitech-equipped force that would threaten Japan—though as far as the government knew, that primarily meant China, not the Peacies. Outside of the truly bizarre and specialized cases of Izumi’s sword or the net-entity’s disruption of the connection, a mantle could be expected to survive anything, and even if it didn’t, the Radiance herself would be unharmed.

The dome Yuuka had deployed around us was much more narrow in its design constraints. It had exactly two jobs: keep physical intrusions out, and withstand half a million degrees Celsius.

Alice’s first pass came and went too quickly for me to separate out in my memory. There was a roar and a flash and when I stopped blinking there was open sky above us again and a dart of distant light was already peeling up and away. A dragon’s tail of glowing vapor followed behind her, reaching back to the line of glowing slag cut across the rooftop. Her skim pass bulldozed concrete out of the way as easily as a finger dragged through frosting. Reality reacted as slowly as I did, the pressure wave taking long seconds to roll in beneath her and snap the limbs off the barren trees on that side of the hospital. If she’d maintained her strafing altitude over the branches in the dry winter air we’d have had a mundane inferno to deal with on top of the magical one.

Yuuka laughed as the dragon arced up and away. It was the same madness-tinged sound as she’d had in the dream. “There it is! Never gets old!”

“Time to go?” I asked, gingerly feeling around my stomach and hastily pulling my hand away from the don’t-do-that reply from my nerves.

“Nah, we’re safer where we are,” she explained. “If I try to pile us all onto the bike and book it out of here right now, we’d have to contend with…”

She pointed meaningfully sunward—west, I supposed—perpendicular to Alice’s rising flight path as she took a long speed-conserving turn back toward us. I squinted through the refraction of the barrier at something silhouetted in the near distance, floating a ways above the rolling not-quite-mountains. It was boxy and had stubby wings in the shape of a shallow V. My heart sank as I identified the craft.

“Peacies. That’s a Condor?” I asked, turning my identification into a hesitant question in the hopes Yuuka would tell me I was wrong and an idiot. If nothing else, it was a distraction from the feeling of hot coals all over my shoulders and chest.

No such luck. “Yeah. The one from the Abe Lincoln. Must have got here in a hurry.”

“And you think they’ll—”

“Only if we do something really really stupid that makes us sitting ducks free to a bad home. Otherwise they’re just here to watch and take notes.”

The Condor-class Forward Logistics Support Vehicle shared many design features with other members of the family of hovering, high-mobility gunships that represented NATO’s long arm and heavy hand. It was fast and freakishly stealthy for its size, carried ripple munitions that the PACT deemed “significant,” and could carry a rapid-deployment squad of exo-suits. Where the Condor differed from its more attack-oriented brethren was that it had a much larger command deck, a launch bay for drones and more esoteric equipment, and onboard facilities that gave it staying power. Instead of attack or interception, the Condor’s role was as a flying hybrid between a nuclear submarine and an aircraft carrier; smaller than either, and indeed small enough to deploy from an actual aircraft carrier as this one had, but nonetheless an advanced mobile base that could post up in hostile territory for an essentially indefinite amount of time and project power until the local authorities worked up the substantial firepower, and more importantly the courage, necessary to shoo it away.

This one was here as a statement. I believed Yuuka’s claims that it wasn’t here to engage us unless we gave them the most flagrant opportunity to do so, but I also understood that we couldn’t openly act against it, either. It was nominally a Japanese ally, here to help deal with the eminently reasonable threat of a developing inferno—backup for us, in theory.

“We don’t need their help.” Yuuka affirmed my line of thought. “Not for killing this thing, or mitigating the ripple. And we’re not gonna let them take the credit, either.” She pointed in a new direction, back toward Tokyo. “News crews want action shots of us, and we’re gonna give them.”

“Controlling the narrative,” I understood. “I thought we agreed that the performative stuff kinda sucks?”

“Not so bad when we’re wrecking shit instead of modeling skin cream.”

That I could get behind. “And we’re showboating? I don’t know if the people who got eaten by this…deserve that. Creates more inferno risk too, won’t it?”

Yuuka waved dismissively. “We’ve got it all in hand. Todai already has helicopters coming out with dampers once we get this clear.”

“They’re ours? Not the government’s?”

“God, you’re full of questions for somebody covered in third-degree burns.”

“Can’t seem to pass out,” I groused. “And isn’t this stuff I should probably already have been told? Unless you want me to stay a larva forever.”

“Yeah, yeah, big sis has you covered. We share. Actually, some of them are on loan from the Peacies to Japan, but the Bureau knows they’re better off in our hands.”

By now, Alice had finished her turn and was coming back toward us for another pass. The building hadn’t responded at all to her initial wave of destruction, no attempt to recontain us on the roof, stunned or simply reeling from an attack it had no concept of. I watched the point of light approach with trepidation; I trusted the shield, but I had to imagine that this was what it felt like to be the wooden dummy in the penthouse’s dojo. That raised its own interesting question: how and where did Alice even practice this scale of grandiose attack?

She was impossible to look at directly, corona eclipsing the faltering sun and leaving dark spots in my vision. Call it Flame, call it Light, her radiance—for that is what it was, most literally—blazed a simple assertion: I am more real than you. Toward us raced power itself, beautiful and blinding. If she had been coming straight for us, I would have simply accepted that I was about to die, shield or no shield.

Of course, we were not the target.

Her second pass struck lower. She punched through the hospital’s main structure this time, rendering those gullet corridors and memories of closed-door violation alike unto so much slag. A concussive thump pulsed through the building and shook everything like an earthquake. The rooftop didn’t drop out beneath our feet—we were actually standing on the flat-cut bottom of the hemispheric dome by now—but the impact still felt absolutely seismic and I was grateful to be lying on the crash pad instead of standing. Not that Yuuka had any problems with her footing as she turned to track Alice’s exit. Another ascending trail of molten debris followed in her wake and I heard the terrible groaning of collapsing masonry below us.

“Fuck,” I said simply. After a few more seconds of listening to the aftermath of Alice’s passing, the sounds of gravity doing its inexorable work on the void she’d just carved, I articulated a more cogent comment. “Did—did that do it? Net shredded? It’s dead?”

Yuuka shook her head. “Tsk. I’d tell you not to tempt fate, but I promise you had no control over this next part.”

The far end of the rooftop burst upward in a torrent of debris. The concrete was crushed and mangled and run through with glowing streaks of heat. Half-molten gravel ascended in a fountain, ten meters, fifteen, twenty—I had the awful sense we were witnessing evolution. Something was happening within, uncomfortably intimate, order emerging within the chaos as I saw more flaps of skin scaffolding their way through the pillar of sedimentary mixture, soon followed by red-hot streaks of slag and rebar. The mass coagulated and seized.

In moments, the violent restructuring was complete. Molten lines became veins. Gravel mocked flesh. It didn’t have enough skin to go around, but that was immaterial; the arm now rising from the building could not be mistaken for anything but what it was, the opening stages of the net-entity’s bid for a new form, inspired by all it had eaten. Yuuka and Alice had inflicted bodily harm on it, and it only understood that through the lens of human mutilation. It would birth itself a new form through the pain. I found myself empathizing with it all too much, right then.

“Just like the bay,” Yuuka observed. Was that a tinge of sadness I heard in her voice as well? Maybe I was imagining it; she was unworried, despite the arm continuing to grow from elbow to shoulder and its fingers coming into stark relief. “Well, not just like. This time we don’t have a rift to shove it back through, but we’ve also got way bigger guns.”

This time I was almost able to guess the play-by-play of Yuuka’s foresight. A line of violet touched the palm of the cyclopean hand from somewhere behind us. I saw a dozen concentric rings, dozens to hundreds of meters across, flare along its length for a fraction of a second, just long enough for me to register first that they were there and then that they were acting as prisms to refract and concentrate the beam. Amethyst was lining up her shot.

In that moment, I expected her artillery to destroy the hand in the same way as it had the Thunder Horse oil rig. That had been terribly, nightmarishly effective, and it was well-suited to this enemy that learned to reform and restructure itself more and more by the minute. In my mind’s eye I saw the limb scooped away by that swallowing, spherical void of annihilation, permanently depriving the building of structural matter and more importantly that suffering-imbued human leather that housed its true power.

It was a good thing I wasn’t the one behind the trigger, then, because that would have been a very bad idea indeed. The Peacies were watching all of this unfold, and no matter how much they may have already suspected that we’d been the intercessors there, handing them proof wasn’t worth the efficacy of such an attack. Instead, the blue ripple produced by Amethyst’s KV-18 Projected Impulse Armament acted upon the towering limb more like how a hydraulic press acts upon a watermelon, except all at once; from where we were standing beneath, it appeared to detonate from the palm outward. Gravel showered across the rooftop as shrapnel, plinking off the dome, some bouncing in strange directions and disappearing entirely as they were caught by the four-dimensional barrier. A cloud of fine-crushed dust immediately rolled across the rooftop after, blocking our visibility, obscuring everything but the violet flashes of a second and then third notes of the barrage arriving above us.

It was loud, painfully so, enough that all three of us instinctively reached to cover our ears, even Izumi, who was still in that twilight zone between waking and unconsciousness. Probably no louder than Alice’s impacts, in hindsight, but to me, those had been glorious, the fiery descent of an angel. I could justify all sorts of sensory discomfort on those grounds, especially knowing that Yuuka’s dome was designed to survive it. This…was not that. Our protective dome wasn’t built for this. I could see it wavering under the strain of the shockwaves.

The thunder flashing through the smokescreen was warfare, plain and brutally kinetic, the type of bombardment that inspired shellshock. And it simply didn’t end. Four impacts became five became six. Even Yuuka was flinching, caught off guard as she held her hands over her ears. She found my eyes and mouthed something frantically, words devoured by the world-consuming pounding of artillery. I was terrible at reading lips, but I thought she said: “She thinks it’s Sugawara!”

Of course. That was the rational thing to think, wasn’t it? We hadn’t had time to explain his profound and conspicuous absence, so for all the other Radiances knew, it was perfectly reasonable that the body manifesting out of the building was his spirit attempting to bootstrap back into the physical world, and Amane was reacting to that with commensurate fury, heedless of us in the blast zone beneath.

With shaking hands I tried to manipulate my meat-phone to implore her to call off the barrage. But the device was bulging from within and I found its surface slick and unwieldy, made all the worse by the assault on my eardrums. I’d long since passed beyond pain-addled fatigue and was hitting the very limits of my ability to function. Frantically, pathetically, I begged my fingers to work the pulsating touchscreen, and they were simply not up to the task. Yuuka was already staggering over to me to slip it from my hand and do it herself—

The rhythm broke. That was worse than if it had continued, because each second of anticipation made me brace harder for the inevitably worse resumption, my entire body coiled with primally fearful tension as the gap since the previous shock of horrible thunder stretched longer and longer. But after an eternity—what might have been ten long seconds—of Yuuka standing equally frozen next to me, both of us feeling so very small, we simultaneously accepted that it had ended. We sagged in relief; she actually flopped down onto the crash pad beside me, rubbing her temples.

“Why’d it stop?” I asked her.

“I’m seeing spots, man, I don’t know,” she groaned, then flinched. “Ah, fuckin—”

A shower of blood burst from nowhere directly in front of us. Within the dome. Several severed scraps of leather fell to the concrete with wet plaps around an absolutely mangled figure.

My heart thudded in my chest. This was the entity’s next attempt to manifest a human body, much smaller than the first, and it was all wrong. It spat and hacked gore out of a too-large mouth. Its head was flanked by a mess of what was supposed to be hair, but mimicking it poorly with the wrong material, more of a mass of bloody inchoate flesh like a crest around its head. One of its legs was shattered, bone jutting out through skin in far too many places. A red mess dominated its midriff beneath a crude approximation of a tank top made of blood. It was vile from faceless head to splintered toe, a corrupted form that almost mocked the doll’s shape I had taken in the dream, grotesquely superior to my current pile of broken meat. Had I taught it how to be this? Had it stolen the secrets of mantle manifestation from one of our minds, using me as a blueprint and flesh as the medium?

It didn’t matter. Amane had cracked the shield and given it a way in. I called for my spear, more for psychological comfort than any hope of actually fighting this thing in my state, as the nightmare creature straightened up, sloughing off more leathery afterbirth, its leg reassembling beneath it, becoming a more capable predator by the second. I crudely hefted my piece of burned wood and placed my speartip between myself and it, feeling like the furthest possible image from Heung’s majestic agility. The entity’s avatar opened its mouth to reveal a row of razor teeth, designed for slicing and shredding, and I knew in my gut that its jaws could snap through my femurs like nothing. I half-sat, half-lay with pure tension, transfixed by horror, holding my spear out in fear.

It reached an arm to its head and grabbed its halo of meat, wringing blood out until it looked more like proper bloodstained hair. Then it wiped its leathery mess of a face, peeling something off, and—

Blue, unmistakable, purer than the deepest sky. Auburn hair, stained and matted but the real thing. Hina, not a mimic, wiped off a little more of the insane quantity of gore she was covered in and smiled at me.

I remember suddenly thinking that she looked absolutely radiant. The gore remained disgusting, and in fact I only resisted retching because I had started to become somewhat desensitized to such wanton bloodshed—but my girlfriend looked so happy, exactly in her element, practically glowing in the detritus of violence. She was a perfect predator, far beyond anything this entity knew how to produce. A mantle would only slow her down, dilute her. I had sensed this within her when we’d met. It had captivated me then, and I loved it now. Her shattered leg warped and bubbled beneath her, already nearing the end of knitting back together.

“Cutie!!!” Hina managed to somehow audibly fit several exclamation points after the word. The breathy strain of exertion rode beneath her voice, but it was all endorphin-enriched energy like she’d just come from a jog. Her energy would have been infectious if it weren’t for the bone-deep exhaustion I was feeling. I was so, so glad to see her. “Babe! Other babe!” She added that for Izumi’s mostly-insensate body, eyes scanning across our open-air bunker. “Holy shit, cutie, you did so good, look at your skin! And your tummy! Whoa, your phone’s gotten all spicy pillow. Juicy pillow? God, I just wanna rip into this thing with you…” she bit her lip at my phone, then nodded to Yuuka, “but I know now’s not the time, Yuu-chan, you don’t have to tell me that, so—”

“Fuckin’ pipe down.” Yuuka sounded incredibly done, which jarred me out of the initial revulsion to my bloodsoaked girlfriend. Hina closed her mouth with the click of snapping jaws and shone a grin at us.

“You’ve been fighting it,” I gathered, unable to resist commenting on her state. “And winning? Is that why Amane stopped shooting?”

“Hm? No, she’s still shooting, just in fourspace now. Way quieter out here, you wouldn’t believe how messy it is over on the other side, I’m having a great time. Realized the mantle was no good, but it’s not like I was really gonna use that anyway. I mean, so much red, I just had to feel what that was like. Can’t get that from a vibrator. And the skin rips so good! Satisfying as hell, you can, like, nyarm,” she snarled, miming ripping out a chunk of the leather with her teeth. “And it’ll just come right back. It’s learning how to fight, too! Smashed my leg and everything.” She indicated her right leg, which looked totally fine now. “Did you know it’s all skinflaps? So weird, like it’s supposed to store something. Sugawara? But I don’t smell him.”

“You got that from just chomping on it?”

“Yep! Smell and taste and shapes!”

My body’s very last dregs of adrenaline, now misplaced, left me flushed with envy of her intuition. “He’s not here. It’s the net from when you were here before. Turned him into a ghost. Now it’s just a…bunch of torture on loop, really.”

“Ooooh. Hot. Do we have to destroy it? I mean, Alice can, but she’s nervous because it’ll totally make her horns sprout, and it’s so juicy, I wouldn’t mind getting up inside—”

She fell silent when I flinched, eyes flickering toward Yuuka, who had frozen, terrified. The way Hina was talking was setting her off; she was totally checked out of the here and now. It was unclear if she was glassy-eyed solely from exhaustion or if she was consulting her foresight, but either way, it was bad.

“Oh, fuck,” Hina swore. “Yuu-chan, did the mess spook you? I didn’t—”

“Quiet,” I told her.

I wasn’t that angry at Hina for not reading the room—she simply hadn’t known what we’d gone through—but I was furious at myself, because I found myself seriously considering her question. It felt like a betrayal, but Hina was indisputably the right kind of creature to negotiate with the net-entity, who could empathize with its sadomasochism and was magically talented enough to show it perspectives beyond that. If such a connection was possible at all, then maybe we could end this without having to destroy it. Being able to study it would be a massive boon. And another part of me, exhausted at the violence, simply wished for mercy.

But I couldn’t and wouldn’t speak for Yuuka. She came back to us after a long silence, blinking and tapping her temple. Her voice was hoarse. “No. No studying it, no giving the Peacies something to point at and go ‘Todai aren’t committed to protecting Japan,’ no giving you something to get your rocks off to like you don’t already have so many toys. Mahou shoujo destroys evil, and this is evil. It didn’t choose to be evil, but it is. I don’t want it redeemed or preserved, I want it gone, because—” she looked up at her teammate and surprised us both. “It—it hurt us, Hina.”

I’d expected more impetus, name-calling fury. This was scarier. I initially feared Hina wouldn’t know what she meant. Of course it had hurt us; that was obvious from our wounds, our exhaustion, the cracked bubble of protection standing around us. But Yuuka wasn’t talking about any of that, and Hina knew it. She shrank. “Yuu-chan, oh no, I didn’t know—”

“It’s not your fucking call to make,” Yuuka choked out, belatedly finding her anger. “Not if you give a fuck about me.”

I watched Hina’s heart shatter into a thousand pieces. Her blue eyes shifted to me, searching for anything. I gave her an encouraging nod, all I could lend from the sidelines of this moment, and she swallowed, then looked down at herself still caked in gore. “Okay. Of course. Sorry. I love you. Sorry,” she repeated, voice going quieter, then sharper. I don’t know if Yuuka saw it right then, but I did: Hina didn’t fall into a spiral of self-loathing this time. No meltdown, no flagellation. “It hurt you, so we’ll kill it. I’ll tear its heart out and eat it.”

I was proud, but I shook my head. So did Yuuka. “Hasn’t got one. We need the biggest guns. Alice’s top end.” Yuuka groped tiredly in Hina’s direction, no longer angry—perhaps that was even mild contrition I caught in her voice—but determined all the same. “Give me your earpiece.”

Yuuka’s had been wrecked at some point before I’d gotten to her. Hina handed hers over without question. Yuuka took a deep breath. “Alice. Hi. It raped me. Kill it. Don’t worry about the horns, Ezzen’s got it covered.”

“I do?” Even if I had known what I was supposed to do to help, I doubted my body or Flame were in any condition to carry it out.

She tossed the earpiece back to Hina. “Not now, you’ve got a hole in your stomach, but she needs the encouragement. She can kill me for it later.” She grimaced awkwardly, then forcibly rebuilt her composure and took Hina’s offered hand to get back on her feet—then Hina yelped as Yuuka pulled her into a hug. “Thanks, kemono. Love…love you too. I’m trying to believe things can be better, and that includes you. It’s gotta.”

She coughed, separating from her teammate and frowning at the gore that had transferred to her front. “Eugh. Get us out of the blast radius, this shield ain’t gonna cut it. Tell Amane to give us covering fire while we back out and then regroup with us, uh, somewhere out of sight of that fucking Condor but where we can still watch, because I want to see it. And we need to make sure we know what to say to the press about Sugawara—make sure the cameras don’t see Izumi. And…”

I mostly checked out at that point. I recall the brief ripping-launching sensation of being transited very swiftly, but very deftly, across the fourspace barrier and out of harm’s way, through what must have been an absolute warzone between Amane and the entity that I don’t remember at all. Hina followed her teammate’s instructions to a T, popping us back out into realspace at the top of one of the nearby mountains maybe half a kilometer away, the PCTF aircraft obscured from sight by the cloud of debris above the inward-collapsing hospital. The vehicle had state-of-the-art sensors, but I’m sure the girls knew that and compensated for it somehow. The great gemstone mecha joined us soon after, air sparking around her from her weapons systems doing their best to safely cool off, and cradled her best friend in a hug. The girls talked media strategy I don’t recall; I’d see the aftermath later. They must have put up another shield, more powerful and complex but roughly the same in function as the previous one.

What I do remember is the incandescent bullet screaming down from the heavens at mach death. To me and probably to all the other flamebearers present, it reminded me of the flamefalls during the firestorms, ragged and overloading with potency. The payload, lost somewhere in the corona, was an extremely angry magical girl, whipping her draconic Flame as bright and hot as it would go, heedless of how the backlash would change her. The hospital contorted and churned beneath her, abandoning all structure, pulling itself into a smaller and smaller footprint, as dense as it could go, cradling its stolen flesh as the forest around it flash-ignited.

Mahou shoujo destroy evil. This one destroyed everything.

Author’s Note:

We’ve reached the end of this sequence! Everybody made it! Up next: aftermath!

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

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May 31, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Brief suicidal ideation

The entity tried to show us what Yuuka wanted. Its limited spread of emotions did include fear, and the bloody-eyed Radiance had instilled more than enough. I wasn’t sure if it could have even refused, plugged into her eye and Flame as it was. It had been co-opted as an extension of the magical organ, parasitized in turn beneath the brunt of Yuuka’s anger. She had access to the whole of its memory.

The problem was that it clearly did not remember Sugawara.

Murky, melty scenes manifested on the handful of screens that remained, signs of a clear struggle to remember. It showed us those strange ceremonies of macabre geometry I’d passed by, but they were incomplete, snippets cutting off randomly after mere seconds and melting into more familiar and blatant depictions of violent excess. The entity wanted to return to its comfort zone and its base nature, the simple recycling of harm for its own sake. We could immediately tell that even if it understood Yuuka’s demands, it could not grasp why it had been made. During the raid, Yuuka had labeled it a trap dangerous to Hina, but that hadn’t bore fruit; from having been in its stolen memories, I now thought it was more likely a horrible stockpiling of power with which to power Sugawara’s resurrection.

It didn’t really matter. The net’s purpose had been ripped out wholesale, leaving critical gaps in its amalgam of memory.

“Maybe that’s what brought it to life,” I muttered, virtual eyes flickering between the screens for anything that might lend a clue. I wondered how closely this resembled Yuuka’s usual stream of data from her eye when she sifted through half-baked echoes of timelines yet to come. “Power without purpose, had to figure out its own priorities.”

“Maybe,” Yuuka replied absently, focusing even harder than I was. “Fuckin’—there it is again, the triangles. You’re not getting anything from those? Weird-ass glyphs, gotta be.”

I shook my smooth-shelled head in frustration. Yuuka was clearly hoping, probably in vain, for a eureka moment where it would suddenly click and I would recognize them as especially esoteric glyph diagrams. She was right, that was the only sensible option, seeing as how the entity clearly thought they were important enough to keep bringing back. But I had a sinking feeling that if they had been glyphs originally, what we were seeing was only vague recollection. The specifics of their shapes were now lost, either by forcible excision or just by being incomprehensible and thus remembered only as shapes.

“The real thing could still be out there, in the actual building,” I suggested. “Maybe we should get out and try to see.”

“No. It knows something, and I will know it in turn,” Yuuka growled. “Sugawara. The Savior. A soul extracted from a body. Doesn’t that mean fucking anything to you?”

It didn’t. When Sugawara had escaped, he had taken everything pertaining to him along with. It made twisted sense that manifesting him had required the harvest of not just raw power but also his truest believers’ impressions and feelings. Theft and possession through and through, even in death and beyond. What remained here did not know what had been taken and only dimly remembered the fact that somebody had once cared.

“This won’t work,” I muttered.

“I’m not leaving here empty-handed! There’s something in this thing. I saw that we’d find what Izumi was looking for. Here. Right here.” Yuuka wasn’t giving in to despair, but I could hear her determination fraying. We were stymied by this virtual lobotomy our subject had undergone. It could not conceptualize that there was a point to all of what it remembered, only that it was being done, from weapon to animal, and even then barely an animal, essentially just a mouth and stomach—

“We’re looking at the wrong thing,” I realized. “We need to be looking at it, not into it. It does have a purpose: eat and digest. That’s what it remembers. That’s what we want. That’s what she’s looking for.”

“Is that what we want?” Yuuka asked. “Because it…”

“Look at it,” I urged.

She frowned in concentration and the handful of surviving screens changed once more, returning to the view of us from the cameras overhead. Then the view zoomed in, past us, at the image of the screens themselves. The view ate itself like a pair of opposing mirrors. And between them, down the infinite tunnel, was a truth, an intention, the magic underpinning this thing.

Yuuka gasped and retched, stumbling slightly; I put an articulated hand out to steady her, though I was also feeling dizzy myself.

We saw it plain as day: it had been made to digest. That wasn’t a byproduct of it having come to life, it was the point, the original purpose. It had eaten Sugawara, turned him from a living soul into a high-fidelity reconstruction of himself and his memories rendered in pure ripple. He had torn out the implementation details, but this entity remained as the process itself, and afterward it had continued its work and its nature. It had just happened to develop a taste for suffering in its consumption, but when you looked past that horror, this thing’s digestive tract was fundamentally the mechanism to digitize souls that Izumi needed to escape her body.

Yuuka pushed off of me to stand under her own power. “Yes. Yes! This is it. Just look at it, damn, it’s all there. But, Ezzen,” she said more haltingly. “It’s also not there. Fuck me, this is weird. Do you…can you do something with this? It’s so…raw. How would you even weave this? Or even write it down?”

“I see it,” I said simply, staring into the truth and knowing that with enough time it was achievable. Not right this second—I’d reached the end of my rope with off-the-cuff glyphcraft and needed to sleep for a week once we got out of here—but it was tractable now. “I can—I’ll figure it out. I know I’ll be able to. I’m smarter than him.”

“Ha! Abso-fuckin’-lutely you are. Lucky you’re around, I don’t know how I’d even explain this to the others.” She coughed awkwardly. “Er. This thing reeks of him, fucker never knew how to make anything but a suffering-in-power-out engine.” Her voice dripped with hate. “He must have told them how to make it, and then they got more help somehow. He—wait, yeah, of course he did. He was in Izumi’s dreams for years, wasn’t he? And she can’t have been the only one. If I can just find some of those memories, some of his other sympathizers, we can grill them and…” She wobbled, cupping a hand over her bleeding eye of jagged crystal.

“There’s more?”

“There has to be.” Her voice deepened and she thundered a command. “Here I see all, even dreams. Show me.”

The view shuddered, trying to change once more, away from its essence. Fog coalesced into a half-seen figure, formless and faceless but gesticulating with blurry arms and clearly speaking into the camera. He was angry and erratic, hardly noble or divine in these vaguely remembered moments, yet something ineffably regal was superimposed over it. The collective memories of his worshippers were filtered by adoration so potent that it leaked out of the screens and oozed over the dream. For the briefest moment I felt a twinge of the unnatural urge to kneel, to abase myself before this higher being and bend myself in service to his glory.

It was not nearly enough to buckle my knees, nor Yuuka’s. The Spire stood. I believed in something higher than him, one which demanded nothing like this. She spat at the image. “Go fuck yourself.”

”Does he…he didn’t have actual mind control, did he? The Vaetna would have destroyed him for that years ago.”

”Yeah, that’s where they draw the line, not all the kidnapping and murder and open intimidation and the soft coup of our entire country,” Yuuka sneered. “But it’s true, he didn’t. But all the rules probably go out the window in dreams, if he’s fuckin’ gotten his hooks into you magically and you’ve already spent years being…ugh. Vile. No wonder Izumi had no choice but to go after you.”

At this new mention of Izumi’s name the image sharpened. Blurred features became a clean-shaven, angular face, and the misty mass below clarified into familiar yet subtly different robes. His expression was stony as he drew a hand back and struck the camera in a slap that shook the world.

”You are mine,” he proclaimed.

The words carried no more of that psychic compulsion, but there was a power behind them all the same. Simpler, more brutal power, the kind that made you comply when somebody pointed a gun at you, that from which all other power descended if you were to trace back far enough. The same power the Vaetna had mastered, but they would never use it for domination like this. He was the very model of the worst kind of flamebearer. From those three words alone I knew that killing him had been the right thing to do—my hands itched for my spear to finish the job.

”N—no longer,” stammered a new voice, heavy with exhausted fear, like that strike had been the twentieth rather than the first and she no longer had much to give. We both jumped; it sounded like it had come right next to us.

I turned to Yuuka. “We have to stop. These are her memories, we’re making it pull her in.”

”Oh, shit. Stop!” She commanded the cameras above us.

The memory on the screen did not dissipate. If I’d had hackles they would have gone up.

“Resisting the truth is the source of pain.” Sugawara’s voice was careful and articulate. “You know this. I helped free you from that pain, built who you are. And that makes you mine, forever. Say thank you.”

But, much to my horror, the entity was fascinated by what it was pulling out of Izumi’s memory. We were losing control. This was so much more personal than the skinnings. It watched as a rapt member of the audience, and I feared we were jogging its memory in the worst way—

The screen imploded from a roundhouse kick delivered to its side. It happened in more of a smear of light than the distinct motions of martial arts; Yuuka had struck it not with human frailty but with the remembered power of a mantle. “I said stop.”

I took her lead. Spear in hand, I moved light as a feather and smashed and skewered the remaining screens as efficiently as I could with moves straight from my daily training routine. Haft strikes and sweeping lunges took the final eyes of the panopticon to bloody pieces.

That was enough to stop this thing from accessing and recreating Izumi’s trauma, but it was also the end of Yuuka’s control over the entity, and now it was injured, afraid, and cornered. The dream around us changed far more violently than anything before. Everything began to melt and shift, blood seeping out of the walls, the ceiling rising as high as an arched cathedral as the blinded cameras retreated. I felt a presence on the medical bed behind us and whirled in alarm—it was empty, but I knew what the dream was trying to do. I turned to Yuuka. “We need to leave.”

“You’re sure we have what we came for?”

I nodded firmly. “Enough. See a way out?”

She looked sharply up at the freshly vaulted ceiling, as if daring the cluster of cameras to come back down. “This thing’s all about memory and ritual.” She pointed down at the medical bed we’d been sitting on. “It lost its lunch last time we killed him. It’ll do it again if we bring everything full circle. Gimme your spear.”

I tossed it over. It was longer than she was tall, but in the dream, that didn’t matter, and she caught it easily and raised it as though preparing to stake a vampire. Every ounce of her conviction drove the tip of the spear into the bed, through Sugawara’s heart.

The lights went out.

When I had woken from my Flame-dream conference call with the Vaetna, I’d been soaked in a high-fever sweat and I had been fundamentally unsettled in my body, disoriented and displaced, until the following morning and then some. It had been awful. Returning from the net-entity’s dream brought back those symptoms—except I had also set myself on fire before going in, and had been burning the whole while. I was groaning in pain before I was even fully awake, my awareness of my surroundings almost completely smothered by the feeling that something was on my skin and it hurt in a primal, get-it-off-me way. The fire was already out and my armor vanished, but all my nerves knew was that terrible harm had been wrought. That sent my dysmorphia and disgust at this meat-body into overdrive, overwhelmed by the experience of even being in my flesh, let alone the alarms blaring throughout my nervous system.

I was a complete sitting duck. I’d displayed incredible ingenuity and determination in getting this far, but I was no Vaetna endowed with limitless capacity for violence and magic. And even if I’d had the faculties to try to start weaving immediately in order to flee the interior of Yuuka’s pod, my willpower had run out and I was spent. Cooked, if you will; a piece of charred, overdone meat in the most literal sense, all potential squandered to the point of insult to the animal that had died to make me, repulsive to all five of the senses.

Fortunately for my sorry ass, Yuuka came out firing on all cylinders. Through bleary vision—were eyes supposed to itch?—I beheld a scintillating constellation of obsidian shards that scattered out of the breach in the pod toward a mass of skin. The shards detonated into blinding ruby and for one brief and blinding moment I saw dozens of meters of the net effortlessly torn apart like a hand through cobwebs before my retinas overloaded and I had to squeeze my eyes shut again.

Things were quiet for one or two more seconds other than the faint shuffling of Yuuka moving beside me. Then I was subjected to a full-body force as though somebody had just floored the accelerator and I had been lying in the backseat. I was thrown in a direction that didn’t exist, pursued by a bone-shaking roar—

I landed on a floor. Cheap, scratchy carpet, to be precise, but it might as well have been silk sheets beneath me, so grateful I was to be back in something resembling reality.

“Oi, Ezza, roll over, quick. To your right, toward me.”

Yuuka’s voice was a little bit away from me, like she was in the same room but facing away. The urgency in it was just barely enough for me to muster what energy I had and heave myself sideways across the carpet. Ow. Scratchy carpet on burned skin. I peeled my eyes open to look at her.

“Good ‘nuff?”

“Yep, stay there. We’ll be out of here in thirty seconds when I get this thing to give us an opening.”

Her clothes were ragged. She’d come straight from class to join this whole adventure, and now her stylish outfit was in tatters, shredded and charred by combat that must have happened moments before I’d woken up. Her heavy overcoat was intact, though, and that gave the short woman a reassuringly solid presence above me.

She was weaving faster than I’d ever seen anybody but the Vaetna or Hina, and with perfect economy. There wasn’t a single wasted movement or lost millisecond of hesitation; her hands danced around each other to bind dark, oily thread in three dimensions. She snapped off the lattice, took two deliberate steps backward, and began to weave something else, staring down at her hands with blazing gemstone in one eye and pure focus in the other.

A twitch of motion from the ceiling above her drew my gaze, in time to see a knurl of twisted rebar emerge and reach down at her like a waterfall. I twitched and reflexively called for my Flame—no chance, even if I’d been fresh and not half dead, it was happening too fast to even take a breath to call out. Yuuka didn’t even flinch as a shadow in the corner of the room expanded impossibly and punched the wave of steel off to the side with an ear-ringing bang, striking so hard it shattered into shrapnel that shredded the far wall of the former waiting room we’d holed up in. Distant rumblings ensued, what must have been more of Yuuka’s traps going off, somehow keeping the entity’s assault at bay even though we were still plainly in the belly of the beast.

I groaned and put my head back down, unwilling to muster fight-or-flight energy any further when my precog companion clearly had things under control. I mostly wanted to sleep to escape the pain; it felt like somebody had used me as a pincushion and then dumped a bucket of especially murderous hot sauce over my head. But blissful unconsciousness just wasn’t happening. In hindsight I probably would have indeed passed out from the pain even a few weeks prior, but my tolerance had gone up just enough for me to remain awake so I could wish I was dead instead. It didn’t particularly feel like an upgrade.

I resigned myself to helping in what ways I could that didn’t involve me leaving the floor, which mostly meant being an ideas guy. Ideas Vaetna-thing-suffering-too-much-to-articulate-a-better-label-right-now. Whatever.

“It’s got Izumi,” I managed to slur.

“Way ahead of you. This room is gonna fold up on us and align the membrane to give us a clear shot right to her pod.”

I was intensely jealous. I’d had to chance it to get my spear across the fourspace barrier; she could just pick the moment ahead of time.

She flicked off one more lattice that fizzled and vanished, then lowered her hands to look at me. “Now we’re just waiting. You’ve done enough, leave it to me.”

The gears were turning in my brain, gummed up by pain but grinding along nonetheless. I was having an important thought, which I located after a few seconds longer than usual. “Whatif…we let it eat her?”

“So it can digest her?” She frowned, her eye sparking with light as she chased down that possibility. “Nope. Pain’s making you stupid, it happens.”

“Buh,” I conceded.

“Neat idea, bad idea, we wouldn’t be able to pull her out when the big guns roll up.”

“Buh?”

“This thing should be setting off ripple alarms all over the country at this point. I give it fifty-fifty whether the girls or the Peacies get to us first. Can’t see that far,” she admitted dourly. “But I’ll take the help. Without mantles we don’t have the firepower to finish this thing ourselves, so we’re just going to play keep-away for a little bit.” She trotted over to me and knelt down. “You’re gonna want to be on your stomach for this—whoa, shit, what the fuck happened to your stomach?”

It took me a moment to recall. It felt like it had happened days ago. “Stabilizer melted.”

“Right, shit, well…” Worry crossed her face and her eye flashed again.

“Hate being meat. ‘zit bad?” What I really meant to ask was how bad it must have been to provoke that reaction when she didn’t seem overly concerned about the more recent and painful burns covering much more of my body.

“You don’t feel it? Ah, fuck, time’s up, we gotta move. Close your eyes and I’ll tell you when you’re good to open them again.”

This time I was able to brace for the fourspace transition. Vertigo flipped my stomach, air turned to oil, light through my eyelids turned to darkness, and the temperature plummeted. There was an awful buzzing noise, like a bandsaw had fucked a swarm of locusts, from directly next to me, some unidentifiable attack from Yuuka directed at either the entity or Izumi’s pod. It was joined by a bassy thrum, then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Got her,” Yuuka confirmed as we accelerated sideways. “One more transit, we’re getting the fuck out. Three, two, one…”

We kicked across the membrane again. Light returned and fresh air hit my nose, telling me we’d made it outdoors. I opened my eyes to see blue sky above me—being rapidly swallowed by a grinding flood of concrete coming up from below us.

I’d shown the building that there was an outside and now it was intent on pursuing us there.

Our trajectory pitched, Yuuka’s hand left my shoulder, and I tumbled onto the rooftop once more, my fall cushioned by some invisible force Yuuka had conjured up in preparation for this moment. Izumi groaned next to me, having landed on the magical cushion as well. She looked physically unharmed but clutched her head in lingering psychic pain from her contact with the entity, unable to help. She and I were just dead weight for Yuuka to defend—and as the latter had said, she lacked the firepower to meaningfully beat this thing.

She did what she could. She stood before us and grimly wove even more, silhouetted against the roiling mass of the building’s shape as it mutated and grew over us to blot out the sun. A shimmering, prismatic forcefield grew from her hand to stretch over us in a protective dome. It closed around us and seemed to create more space than there should have been—probing flaps of skin peeking through the animated rubble touched it and diffracted into smaller shapes that couldn’t reach through. Suddenly Yuuka sagged, defeat in her voice.

“That’s all I’ve got.”

Fear clutched my heart. “Checkmate?”

“Stalemate, as far as us and this thing are concerned. This kind of shit is the problem mantles exist to solve,” she sighed, watching the entity attempt to brute-force its way past her shield, hands idle at her sides for the first time since we’d escaped the dream. “It’d take me about seventy seconds to weave a big gun that could really take a bite out of it, but firing it would collapse this shield from leakage interactions and I can’t get all three of us out in what comes after. A gun that wouldn’t do that would take me six minutes, even with your cleverest ideas, and we only have five until the shield goes down on its own.”

“…Sounds like checkmate to me.”

Suddenly she turned on her heel. A slightly mad grin had spread across her face and she posed like I’d seen in the dream, hand over her eye, her signature look.

“Heh. If it were just us, sure. But the power of friendship—and incredible violence—always prevails. This shield is built for a very particular kind of firepower. Tell her it’s mode three.”

“Huh?”

On cue, my phone buzzed in my pants pocket. Or more accurately, it shivered—ripple exposure had turned its internals to flesh, and it was a viscerally uncomfortable experience to wrap my fingers around it and dig it out of my pocket, like grabbing some wriggling vermin from its hidey-hole. The screen still worked, at least, and the caller ID immediately told me that the day was saved.

I picked up and put it on speaker. Radiance Opal’s voice came through the voicebox, crushed up by static but audible.

“Oh, thank God. We’re just getting visual now. Is it as bad as it looks?”

Words rushed out of me at once. “Alice, it’s bad, I’ve—we’ve—building’s alive, mantles are down, we’re in a bubble inside. Mode three, Yuuka says.” I wished I knew what that meant.

“Ah. Mode three, huh? Knew I was coming, good on her.” There was a smile in her voice. “Peacies are here, by the by, and they’re about to get front-row seats to why they haven’t tried to fuck with us. Beginning attack run, danger close.”

The dragon of Todai struck the possessed building like a cruise missile.

Author’s Note:

At last, the light at the end of the tunnel, and it’s dragonfire. This might actually be the first engagement in the entire story where Yuuka’s eye hasn’t gotten completely punked, I’d say she’s acquitted herself as well as she can under the circumstances. Now her girlfriends can do the rest.

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

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May 22, 2026

CONTENT WARNING: This is the darkest chapter in the story so far. Lots of bad stuff, full list below. None of it is beyond the pale for themes previously discussed in the story, and I worked hard to balance the tone (no glorifying here!) but much of what’s depicted and implied in this chapter is still severe enough that you have the option to skip this chapter and read a little trigger-free summary instead.

CONTENT WARNING LIST (STRONGLY RECOMMENDED ON THIS CHAPTER)

Body horror, gore, mind control, forced nudity, discussion of sexual assault, unreality, torture, intentional misgendering. No sexual assault is depicted in detail.

TRIGGER-FREE SUMMARY

Ezzen enters the dream of the net-entity, which manifests as a twisted version of the hospital full of all the memories of the evil acts that took place there. Ezzen remains lucid, protected by its Flame and its fury, and searches for Yuuka as the halls become more and more fleshy and organic. It eventually finds her in the room where they killed Sugawara, watching all the scenes at once through a bank of CCTV cameras. Ezzen manifests as the doll to convince Yuuka that she’s safe and that the dream isn’t real. Together, they smash the monitors and Yuuka regains access to her foresight. She turns her eye on the net-entity, demanding that it show them how Sugawara rebirthed himself so she can give the technique to Izumi.

Down and down I went. From a rooftop beneath the setting sun, into the lair-gullet trap of the entity that had formed from the desecrated hospital, across into the abyss beyond its mouthparts, and at last into its dream which had infested the cursed eye of Radiance Heliotrope, I dove through the circles of hell to save my friend, all the way to the bottom. A dive the Heron would have approved of, I’d like to think, armored in fire and blood.

And the armor was necessary. The halls of the dream-hospital looked deceptively normal at first glance, much like how it had when I’d seen it through Alice’s bodycam, but the screams that came from just around every corner and behind every closed door told the truth: this deepest pit was no place for soft things. Each step seemed to put new evils on display, jumbled together in a messy cascade and strung together in looping sequences to be paraded before me by the carousel of dream-logic with only passing regard for the building’s proper layout.

Violence was a constant. Pain was not the only form of red ripple, but it was one that Sugawara’s true believers had clearly prized and at least crudely understood how to harness. I glimpsed bound and gagged figures being stabbed and beaten through doorways purposefully left ajar, carried out with slow and ritualistic care between members of the cult and with sickeningly eager abandon on outsiders. Other times I saw bodies bent over, grasping and humping and grunting. Though everything in the dream was happening at once, I could tell that these were older moments, from the years Sugawara’s comatose body had been imprisoned here and his cult had infiltrated and taken over in his wake. I recognized in them the same consumptive desires I’d felt in him, echoing through the memories of his cult and their victims. 

More recent and vivid were the skinnings. I turned a corner to see rows of flayed carcasses hung from the ceiling, straight down the hallway and in the open as people came and went, human lives reduced to being simply part of the furniture. Men naked to the waist carefully sliced and scraped while others cycled buckets and plastic tarps to catch the blood. One of them turned to me. In the real world I would have braced for him to lunge; I’d like to think I might even have struck first in order to never give him the opportunity. Here in the dream, I simply waited. He did not grapple me but instead simply held out his knife handle-first and smiled warmly. “You have to give it a try,” he urged. “We’re going to make it all right again. They’re fresh and ready, you’ll be forgotten if you don’t.”

The dream wanted me to take the knife. It was a pressure just shy of physical, a strong intrusive thought, the same call of the void that made people jerk the steering wheel into oncoming traffic. The blade he offered promised excitement and novelty, and what he was saying was eminently reasonable; there was no way making it all right could be a bad thing, and they were fresh and ready, it was true. I’d miss my chance if I didn’t join in now.

Those were the net’s thoughts—or more accurately the thoughts it was relaying, the impressions and memories of when this had taken place in the real world. Either way, they were not mine, and it was profoundly horrifying to feel the net crawl across me like that, trying to bind me up and puppeteer me to play the proper role, the inevitable role. The dream and the entity dreaming it wanted my experience and that memory to become indistinguishable. I would take the knife and join them in skinning, reenact the memories of a man weeks or months dead who had done just that. Then I would be shuffled deeper through the exhibits to repeat the experience, force-fed every morsel of disorienting violence and hedonic excess.

This psychic entrainment was the entity’s proper feeding process; to continue the metaphor of carnivorous plants, the dream was the sticky resin loaded up with paralytic and digestive enzymes, where the final immobilization and consumption of the unfortunate souls took place. The prey would experience every act in these halls as both perpetrator and victim. I’d had the briefest taste of that the first time I’d touched the net, and it had almost taken me entirely. Now it was obvious what would have happened had it taken any longer. I would be inevitably drawn to partake in the recollections of twisted hedonics, my need to escape and even my awareness that there was anything to escape to washed away in a crimson tide, my soul paralyzed to witness and become complicit in the carousel of atrocities until my selfhood dissolved into it, digested into the entity. It was the automatic result of contact with the net, as simple and mindless a process as any chemical breakdown of prey.

Mindless or not, it was still horrific. That feeling was a potent seed of resistance inside me, and though it clearly had not been enough for any of the other victims I’d encountered thus far, my Flame gave me an advantage. At a mechanical level I assumed it was mainly scattering the red ripple into other colors, but I suspected the reality of my atemporal Flame’s interaction with this time-flattening bundle of suffering was far more complex and hateful than what glyphs or colors could sum up. Whatever the case, the simple result was that “armor” was acting like a wetsuit, insulating me and making me aware which thoughts and feelings were my own and which ones sounded more like stage directions.

I did take the knife, and for a long moment I weighed the temptation of driving it through the man’s eye in violent, petty vengeance, before tossing it aside. I was Ezzen, paradox heir to the Vaetna, not an actor on their stage. I couldn’t deny that I was disturbed by each tableau of torture or mesmerizingly nauseating fragment of animal pleasure, but instead of eating away at me until I dissolved into the soup, it all turned into further concern for Yuuka. That kept me lucid and pushed me forward. I kept running.

The abattoir hallway ceased to exist behind me as soon as I left the scene; the first few times I’d acted to interfere, I’d naively hoped I had destroyed it by refusing to participate and incapacitating the perpetrators, but those had been dashed when I’d realized I’d passed by the same scenario twice and the surgeon’s jaw was decidedly not shattered the second time around. So now I didn’t bother, bleakly admitting that there was no point in attempting to free the victims, salve their wounds or attempt to reassemble each lost soul. These were not ghosts, I told myself, nothing I could save. This thing was made from people in the same way that a house was made out of trees. The net was made of skin, but it was made of only skin, not enough to reassemble a person.

Perhaps that wasn’t true. Perhaps, with time and study, I could have unraveled the mechanisms behind this grisly fate and undone them. Perhaps that’s what a Vaetna would have done in my shoes. Too bad. I was here for Yuuka. I’d figure out how to put the skin back on a body if she needed it and not before.

The labyrinth unfurled ahead of me, damp and inviting, bidding me deeper.

—

My search had little direction to it; my grasp of the hospital’s layout was secondhand to begin with, and this version’s broken-neck corners and looping stairs and yonic doorways didn’t subscribe to its shape in life anyway, mere connective tissue between the memories of bliss and murder and things between, none of which I stopped to indulge save to peek my head in and verify that none of the cast were Yuuka Hirai. The horror of this theme park of sadomasochism grew stale quickly for me when I could freely move through it with no regard for its intended pacing or the delirium that was surely meant to take hold. So my primary emotion soon cooled from rage to frustration; it was unclear whether I was making any progress at all.

I looked up at the ceiling, the only direction I hadn’t yet attempted. That’s when I noticed the cameras growing from above like inverted mushrooms.

They were everywhere and watched everything. Some were those bulbous, glossy black domes, obtrusively sticking out of the gray fireproofed ceiling, opaque as to the target of their attention. Others were boxier and had a clear dark glass eye that gave them a sense of direction and purpose, perching in the top corners of waiting rooms to watch the more private depravities unfold. Still others were a hybrid of the two, blurry dream-amalgams that did not need a coherent form to function. Some of them swiveled off of their respective scenes to track me as I ran through the halls.

These artificial eyes were conspicuous. Both the entity and I had entered this place through Yuuka’s cursed gemstone eye, and to me, that made it all too likely that I would find her wherever these cameras fed their vision. I stopped in front of a rack of drying skins and placed myself in front of the camera that had been watching it.

“Yuuka, if you’re watching me, show me the way?”

The camera stared back at me, impassive. After a long moment of waiting, I grumbled to myself and got moving again, continuing down the hall.

From then on, the building’s texture began to change. For all the hospital’s irredeemably violated layout and the atrocities taking place within, it had at least still looked like how one might expect an abandoned hospital might, with broad hallways, plain colors, and simple right-angle geometry. As I progressed deeper it slowly began to lose that cohesion, first with corners blending together where the wall met the ceiling, and soon after the materials themselves became corrupted.

It felt like I had passed from a branching arterial bloodstream into long, digestive bowels. Drywall and paint turned to soft, glistening membrane. The easy-to-clean linoleum tiles took on a hollower and stiffer sound beneath my feet as they turned to bone or cartilage until occasionally my step landed a little too hard and cracked through to sink a little into mucosal linings beneath. The hallways began to constrict and wind, and side rooms became less and less frequent, sometimes crudely blocked off by tumors of unidentifiable flesh. The cameras began to have eyes for lenses. Humidity clung to me as I ran.

The screaming grew more distant and less numerous. The memory ghosts grew fewer, and when I did see them, the acts of carnage had grown more abstract. The skinning rituals and drying racks gave way to ceremonies of geometry, masked men cutting leather into triangles and strips. Where there were still recognizable thresholds between halls and rooms, they were adorned with geometric patterns I didn’t recognize as any sort of glyphs.

I had passed into this thing’s memories of the acts leading up to its birth, I realized. Deeper. Good.

That thought emerged right as I rounded a corner, and of course, that was when I came upon a corridor I did recognize. It was the final redoubt before the Radiances had reached Sugawara, where they’d sent his mercenaries packing with pure intimidation before busting down the door. There was no sign of the hired guns here, which I took to mean that they’d scarpered immediately after that encounter and not gotten caught up in any of this.

The hallway was two places at once. It was lined with doors as I remembered, yet the corner of my eye insisted they were wet and glistening and much narrower, a tighter fit than before, one I’d have to squeeze through. This second version of it was a fleshy tube, another mimicry of potently remembered biology like the creature’s throat in the real world. This did not feel consumptive or digestive in the same way as the previous corridors, nor was it a memory. The threshold I stood at was a vertical slit and the walls were lined with eyeballs. Crude literalism reigned here, inseparably reproductive and voyeuristic at once.

Instead of trying to dissolve my thoughts and selfhood with temptation and sensory assault, this thing had changed tactics and decided it would have my participation in the most basal way it knew. It wanted to watch me penetrate through, fill it, press all the way down to the door at the end. There, in the womb, I knew I would find Yuuka, right where her eye had claimed Izumi would find what she wanted. And now I feared she would not be alone.

That was where Sugawara had died and been reborn. By all rights, I knew it would be the most powerful nexus of red ripple in the real building and the strongest memory. But his ghost, or at least the memory of it, had been absent from this place, conspicuously so, unmentioned even by the rapturous members of his own cult. Against this grotesquely vaginal framing, it now made all too much sense for him to be in that room with Yuuka, in some way enfleshed and empowered and in control.

He had violated her enough already. So I did as the corridor asked, just not how it wanted me to. This thing still did not know me.

I was a spear. Still phallic, but beyond the context of this thing’s memories, the motions and acts of flesh it understood. Of course, I’d plainly seen in a dozen ways that it understood stabbing, but only in depraved eagerness and mortal terror. I was eager, but not for this absurd metaphor of sex. I was afraid, but not for myself.

The memory of my vaet lanced down the tube of flesh, and me with it, and we punched a hole clean through the door. The burning line of violence was hardly the shredding whirlwind I had watched Sani and Bri employ, not enough to destroy the dream or even puncture to the outside, but it got me through. An infinitesimal gap for me to enter while leaving the rest of the hallway untouched. I arrived as an omen of violence, no longer caring if that would play into this thing’s desires, ready to behead Sugawara a second time.

The room was mostly as I remembered it in the last moments I’d seen it, blood and all, save for the absence of the symbolic splatter of gore behind the bed that Sugawara had used. It was hot, sweat-slicking, seeking the memory of fevered delirium or the motion of bodies. A choking atmosphere of red ripple filled this place. The thing orchestrating this carnival of horror was most present here and practically salivating.

Sugawara was not. That was a true relief, but only for a moment, crushed swiftly by Yuuka’s appalling state. My fears about what the dream might do to her had been woefully close.

She was naked, lying unbound in the gore-dampened bed where Sugawara had breathed his last, her legs held up and spread. Both her eyes were human, looking across the room with boredom.  I followed her gaze and saw that she was watching a bank of CCTV monitors—glancing at them made me dizzy, unable to tell if there were dozens or hundreds. This was where the cameras led. This was clearly a metaphor for how the net had infested her mind via her eye. Yet it had also taken that away from her, the relic of blood magic meant to be her greatest weapon, reducing her to a mere damsel in distress, an object for me to pursue.

“Hey,” she greeted me without looking. She made no attempt to get up.

I didn’t want to look at her nude body or the monitors, so I turned, scanning the room for…anything, really. Yuuka’s clothes, signs of sexual violence, anything that the net-entity might see as a fittingly grim punchline for all of this.

“You’re alright?” I asked warily. “That’s—a relief, this place is horrible. We’re getting out of here.”

“Out of…?” I heard a frown cross her voice. “There’s no out. This is it.”

My blood ran cold. When Izumi had said she wasn’t fighting back, I’d feared this might be the case. Yuuka didn’t have her flame buffering between the dream and her consciousness like I did. I had to do so instead. I stepped between her and the monitors and made eye contact. “Yuuka, this is a dream. The net-entity’s dream. All that on the screens? That’s not real, neither is the building. It’s just a hallucination, a bunch of patched-together memories. I came in here to get you out. We have to go.”

“Oh, you don’t really fuckin’ believe that, do you? You came here for these,” she said, rolling her shoulders to shift the twin masses on her chest, then spread her legs further. “And this. ‘S all anybody wants me for anyway, so hurry up and rape me already.”

I was horrified. This thing of memories was playing on her own worst ones, trying to build a scene that would recreate them so it could siphon the potency of her distress and harm, and it was messing with her head to further that end, to make her an actress in the performance. Its lead role, and everything I had seen in the twisted halls had merely been side shows and supporting actors.

But I was sure she had never played this role, not like this, not the jaded, expectant passivity. Alice had implied that Yuuka’s use of sex to bait human traffickers in pursuit of Amane had been entirely more calculated and ruthless than this. I didn’t know for certain—it wasn’t my place to know and Alice had been wrong to share even that much—but if I had to imagine how she had gone about it, there would have been far more cherry-sweetness and dopey innocence before she slit their throats to rifle through their files and manifests. Still horrific, but full of desperate volition. This arranged scene was a false construction of the role she had played and an insult to the woman I knew.

Perhaps it was in part how she remembered it, but even then, that meant that the dream was boiling all the vicious drive out to leave behind only the harm and trauma of what had been done to her. It didn’t even leave her the gemstone eye. Her character was irrelevant to it, only her hurt and the power that lay within it.

It filled me with rage.

“Absolutely the fuck not,” I retorted. “I’m not one of those fucking animals outside. I’m Ezzen, you know me,” I said, hoping she even recognized me.

“Really? You look like them. Spear and a spear, practically walking innuendo. I know you’re itching to stick at least one in me. Look, they’re all waiting, too, so hurry up.”

She pointed up and my stomach dropped. The ceiling was festooned with cameras and eyes staring down at us, watching. I turned jerkily to check the bank of CCTV monitors—so many of the screens were different angles of this room, her leaned back on the medical bed, me standing over her, naked, dick out—

My rage on her behalf was overtaken by resentful proprioception, the damnably concrete awareness that I did have a penis and it did nominally find Yuuka attractive. This was the trap; I had been braced for Sugawara to play the opposing part to her worst traumas, but the dream wanted me, because that was how she was seeing me in this moment.

It struck right at the heart of my insecurities to still be seen as another unknown predatory man, another monster meant to have his way with her. Yuuka had neuroses, but surely she didn’t truly see me as that, not any more, not with all we’d been through and the open attempts to trust me. No matter how far gone and strung along to be an actress on the entity’s insulting porno set, I thought I had earned her trust more deeply than this. It hurt.

With that hurt, as always, came the desire to change.

What was on those screens was a lie. That was not me. No part of me found this attractive, this farce, this flaying humiliation of a woman I’d come to respect. I would not be party to it. I had been invited onto this stage, but I refused to play the matching role. 

With a thought, I morphed, my armor wrapping around me into a smooth, flat, synthetic shell. I lost the pretensions of muscle mass and organs and a face. Two breasts of my own hung duct-taped to my chest, silicone softness atop the shell. I showed her that which was truer and sharper than the dream’s lie.

“I am Ezzen,” I repeated, my voice synthetic, softer in tone but as sharp as any blade. “I am not a man.”

I could have sworn I saw a puppet string sliced asunder as a flash of recognition crossed Yuuka’s expression. “The…sex doll,” she stumbled, the wheels turning in her head.

Nerves bubbled in the stomach I didn’t have. That moniker left little ambiguity indeed; this was hardly a full-throated rejection of sexuality. The form of the doll had been chosen in haste, and no matter how I felt about it, this was still undeniably a sexual object. I banked on the hope that whatever acts she had witnessed or participated in with this drone had been lesbian, within the confines of the penthouse, with people she loved, and was thus not a shape that bore any resemblance to the men in those dark places of her mind.

“Nothing will happen to you,” I promised, silently urging her to fight it, too afraid to say anything more.

A long moment lurched between us. Then it happened—reality, harsh and frigid, intruded on the dream’s dense, sweltering atmosphere. The performance crumbled as I felt the entity recoil, dropping its strings in confusion. Eyes overhead winced shut. In turn, Yuuka’s widened in recognition, then fluttered, blinking away the pacifying glaze of her role. She jerked, then hastily closed her legs. “Ezzen, oh, shit, what the fuck, how did I—no, you’re not like that, I know that, shit!”

I breathed a simulated sigh of relief. “Oh, thank fuck. With me now?”

“I—you didn’t see that. You didn’t see that,” she repeated, voice beginning to shake. Reality was a terribly cold thing. She breathed hard, sitting up and crossing an arm over her boobs.

“You didn’t want it,” I assured her, averting my eyes again and turning away, scanning the floor again in the hopes that her clothes would manifest so I could hand them to her. “It’s this place, the fucking net-entity, these cameras. It’s gotten into you and we have to get out.”

“Just—shut up for a moment. Shut up. I know it’s not real, it’s not, I just need to—” I heard her strangle what might have been a sob. “Fucking cunt. Clever fucking brainless thing,” she cursed up at the nest of cameras. “Got in my head because it’s not wrong.”

“No, Yuuka, of course it’s wrong,” I urged, “It’s—”

“I said shut up. It’s not just a fucking dream! It is, but it’s not!” She took another rattling breath. “This is what real life is, Ezzen, this is how the world works! Just a bunch of—stabbings and skinnings and rape, that’s what actually drives everything. I’ve seen it. I lived it! All this thing is doing is cutting out the middleman.”

We were quiet for a long moment until I found what to say.

“I understand.”

“You don’t. Not like I do. I see it everywhere. That’s how it got me. I couldn’t tell the difference when we were coming in. The building looked—it looked normal. That’s normal to me.”

I wanted to point out that her eye was usually wrong, but that wouldn’t get us anywhere. I emitted a sigh and half-turned back to her, shuffling very slightly toward the bed. “Can I sit down?”

She gave me a wary, hunted look. Her eyes slid down to my boobs and stayed there for a few seconds. Then she nodded, curling her legs toward her so that she was mostly out of arm’s reach. “Yeah.”

I sat. The positioning felt too much like I was a parent about to give their kid a pep talk, and Yuuka deserved better than that. I swung my mechanical legs fully up onto the bed and crossed them beneath me instead.

“Not like you do. True. You’ve been through some horrible stuff, Yuuka.”

She rolled her eyes. The effect was stronger when she could do it with both of them. “And I’m so strong for keeping on with it despite that, is that it? I’m gonna punch you in the tit if that’s where you’re going with it.”

“Nah. I mean, yeah, but not my point. My point is that…world’s fucked, and I should be dead, or worse. But I’m not. I lost a foot, almost got captured by the Peacies and…well, I’d like to think they wouldn’t have turned me into a battery, I’m more useful in other ways. It still woulda been bad, is what I’m trying to say, and instead, I’ve had it pretty good. Pretty bloody good,” I repeated. “Thanks to you. Todai’s power and your…kindness? Tolerance.”

“Your accent’s so weird,” she cut in a little too airily. “Brit, but you talk like an American and the accent kinda slops off, until those words come out and you sound like Alice again.”

I took the needling as a tentatively positive sign for her mood and elected to play into it. “Says the Japanese girl with an Australian accent. Do you want to talk about that instead? We don’t have to—I mean, we do have to get out of here, but if you just need to talk about literally anything else…”

“Well, my accent comes from learning English by flirting with Aussie dockworkers twice my age to promise them a blowie if they could tell me when the next ship from Malaysia was coming in. Y’know, because it was a ship that might have had Amane on it and that’s the only lead I had. This is all I’ve got, Ezza, this has been my entire fucking life from the day the Flame hit us. It all comes back to that. So no, I’d rather not. What were you saying?” she asked sweetly.

“Uh. Fuck.” The admission was one thing, the flippancy with which she’d delivered it was altogether more saddening. I hoped what I said next would help. “I just—you’ve all done a lot for me, is what I wanted to say. Taken on a lot of risk with the Peacies and maybe a bigger one letting me just…be in the penthouse and hang out with you, as an unknown. I’m…grateful, and I feel like I haven’t really shown you all that and it’s just been a lot of shame instead. And you specifically, you’ve given me more grace than I could imagine after how you’ve been hurt. If the world is a big pile of murder and other bad shit, it sure seems to stop at the penthouse’s door. So…thanks,” I trailed off awkwardly, running out of steam.

Yuuka gave this a moment’s consideration, running her hand down her hair. She shook her head sadly. “And I’m still selling my body to keep that sanctuary. Same engine, just more flash. Here’s my tits, money please, don’t ask what happened to that oil rig. Yoyogi Park? Ah, infernos happen, mate, Sapphire actually stopped it from being worse, promise, she’ll go do some meet-and-greets to make up for it, that seems fair, doesn’t it?” She pressed her arms together to scandalously show off her cleavage, then snarled up at the cameras on the ceiling. “Those? Those are real, even if they’re a lie.”

I didn’t know enough about Todai’s celebrity activities to argue that with any nuance. Instead I threw a hoodie across the bed. One of my big, bulky, oversized ones that hid the form well, summoned from my memories. I wordlessly produced a second one and shrugged it on to hide my own breasts. When my head emerged, I was pleased to see Yuuka had done the same and was now staring at the design on mine quizzically.

“Have you even seen Sailor Moon?”

“Hina got it for me.”

She glanced down at her own, brow furrowed. I hadn’t had particular designs in mind, and as she focused on hers, it changed to a different set of magical girls. I knew that was Madoka Magica because Star never shut up about it. Yuuka harrumphed. “Oh, fuck’s sake. I can’t believe you’re actually making me feel better with an anime hoodie.”

“Armor’s important,” I said simply.

“…It is. I hate when the Vaetna are right about shit. They’re right about all that sanctuary stuff, too, fuckin’ damn it all. We made a place for ourselves, a place without all…that.” She indicated the CCTV monitors. “Mostly. Enough. Glad you were here. And it’s good. I know that.”

She hopped off the bed, suddenly full of energy, and stomped across the room to the monitors. The short woman bunched up a fist and drove it straight through one of the screens.

“It’s good!” she repeated, heedless of the blood dripping down her knuckles. “And you don’t get to fucking hide it from me!”

She smashed another, and then another. I would have smiled if I could. I leapt off the bed to join her—she held out her other hand to halt me. “Only the ones with all the kemono shit. Not the ones on us.”

I understood. My plastic fists smashed glass and rent circuitry asunder, following her lead. There was meat within some of the screens, unidentifiable giblets joining the mechanical trash rapidly covering the floor. The entity had exposed its nervous system directly to Yuuka, and now we were tearing it apart. The entity was powerless to stop us as we turned the brutal literalism of its control over her into so much scrap.

It was decidedly un-magical, pure and simple violence, and it took its toll on her especially, slicing up her knuckles and nicking her face with flying glass. I saw her wince and recoil as a piece flew right into her eye; instead of calling for a pause, she just laughed and hurled the next monitor across the room to dash it against the door. It happened again a few moments later. This time Yuuka didn’t even slow down, and neither did I, even as her eye dripped blood down her cheek.

I, on the other hand, was impervious. My knees and elbows and the not-quite-feet at the ends of my legs were capable tools of destruction, and it felt good to finally have something to take all my horror and rage out on. I hoped that each smashed monitor also destroyed the scene it was depicting and laid what remained of these poor souls to rest. In the remaining cameras, the ones showing us, I saw us ruining this thing’s nervous system, and it was good. This was me and her as we were supposed to be. Yuuka saw it too and laughed even harder. Her right eye was swollen shut.

When almost all the screens were destroyed, and it was only us left, Yuuka turned to me. Her eye was ruined, a gory mess of gouges and gashes, taken to shreds by our raucous violence. She kept laughing, properly villainous and mocking, as she reached in and scooped and scraped with her blood-slick fingers and removed the lie the monster had placed over her vision. In her eye socket glimmered red and black, reborn in violence.

“Houseki hikare!” Radiance Bloodstone roared, knee-deep in triumphant gore. Then she turned to face the cameras cowering above us. “Behold the dread prophet,” she intoned, looking the net-entity in its cluster of eyes. “You will burn. But first. Izumi Takagiri needs a future, and I will give her one.”

“Yuuka?” I asked.

She pointed a finger up at the entity.

“I will see the monster that made you! He died here, right here, in this bed, where we killed him. He was here, and now he is not. You were there, and you were a part of it. He remade himself from you. I will have that secret and every other! Show me how he did it. Show me where he has gone. Show me everything.”

Author’s Note:

This chapter was pretty mean to Yuuka (and Ez to a lesser extent), so thanks for bearing with me. I worked hard on getting this chapter as right as I could (three days of delay!) and I hope you can feel what I was going for. Special thanks to the beta readers for helping me at every turn, they helped me realize at the eleventh hour that there was more that could be done, and I’m proud of the execution. I’m a little nervous too, but if you’re reading this you’re four hundred thousand words in, and I had to spend that trust eventually. If you liked the chapter (or if you think I missed a CW), please let me know in a comment!

Next chapter will be brighter. It’s definitely not coming this Sunday; I’m tentatively saying it’ll be next Sunday, May 17, and if I get it done before then it’ll be up for patrons.

That’s all for this week!

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May 6, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Body horror, buried alive

Izumi gave me the exact verbal kick in the ass I needed. One I had needed for a while, in all honesty. Rushing headlong toward blood magic out of desperation was normal for inexperienced flamebearers in a crisis, but I was far more qualified than that. Even a single minute of planning and I could work wonders without sacrificing anything at all.

“The net’s across the boundary between here and the pod,” I considered aloud. “As in, bits of it are here in  threespace, like the part we passed through, but the vast majority of it is stretching over the three-four boundary. That was the original purpose for it, probably, yeah?”

“Probably. So it would actually be a…three-dimensional net?”

“Yep. We’ll confirm that in a sec, but that’s the reasonable assumption. Like how a normal, flat two-dimensional net can have a three-dimensional shape to wrap around something; same principle moved one dimension up. And your pods—yours and Yuuka’s—would be inside the portion of three-dimensional space it covers out in the fourth dimension.” My confidence grew as I spoke and laid out the arrangement of each element in my head. I couldn’t visualize the fourth dimensional positioning exactly, but all we really cared about for our purposes was that the mantle pods were on the far side of the net, and enclosed so that we couldn’t just cross into the fourth dimension somewhere else to go around it. That’s how I would have done it, I figured.

“Then how did we get in?” Izumi wondered. “We did not touch it on the way in.”

“Maybe it was dormant. Or just pulled itself out of the way as it saw us come in, actually, since that’s basically what it already did with that,” I hypothesized, pointing to the hole in the roof. It had been blasted open by Yuuka, but before that it had been open to the sky initially as our point of entry.

“And it cannot act beyond the three-dimensional space of the building, it seems? Or it would have already attacked us.”

“Yeah. Who knows how far it goes in the fourth dimension, but I think it’s enclosed. It’s a net, it keeps stuff in. I’ve sort of got an inkling that it doesn’t even truly understand there is an ‘outside’ beyond itself.” Too much theorizing, I told myself; walk it back, focus on the problem at hand. “So we gotta get you two out of there, Yuuka first. Cutting it open is a bad idea, I think, if I could even get {SEVER} to do that. But that’s not really the best use of my spear, is it? It’s a net, not a wall. It’s got holes. It’s mostly holes, even. And if it has holes…I don’t think it’s actually an obstacle to me.”

She nodded, following my meaning. “You mean your rain step.”

She experimentally rolled one of her legs—the motion was twitchy and jumpy, intermittent, like you’d see in an online game with serious packet loss. I’d played a few in my day, but never for long. I watched her movements with concern. “Yeah. Hold that thought. Can you get yourself out of here?”

“…No. I am stuck.” 

“How? You can control both your bodies at once, can’t you? Like, Yuuka’s probably locked into her mantle right now so she can’t weave, but you’ve got the dual-control thing going on.” Izumi did have a pod like the others, and must have been employing it to be caught in the net as she was, but I would have expected her awareness to be more distributed across both of her bodies, as it had been when we’d fought both of her at once at the festival. Her flesh in the pod shouldn’t have been as helpless as Yuuka’s with the connection disrupted by the net.

She grunted. “Since we fought Sugawara, I have been leaving as much of myself out of the other body as I can. I did not want two bodies, I want this body. Mistake.” Her mouth was a little out of sync with the words.

My heart hurt for her. “Right. Okay, that makes sense. Not a mistake,” I asserted gently. “You’re—this thing is insane, you couldn’t have—”

“We do not have time to argue. Yuuka-chan will die or lose her mind before me.”

“But you still can control both bodies if I unfuck your connection? You’re the easier one if I don’t need to fully free you and just need to unfuck your connection enough to—”

Izumi put up her hand. “I hear her. My senses are back.” She was scrambling to her feet before I could respond. “I’m going to—” She suddenly collapsed back to the ground, face-first, and groaned incoherently for a long second. “Gone. Ow, it’s—the net is shifting. It is trying to contain her and she is not fighting it.”

I swallowed. “Oh, fuck.”

Izumi groaned in pain as the net invisibly attacked her nerves. I could tell it wasn’t the incoherent, mind-breaking agony I’d gone through, but it was pain nonetheless, plain in her voice.

“Izumi?”

“Ah, I can’t move my arms. I can’t move my arms,” she repeated in a simulated gasp, despair soaking through her voice as she lay slumped and unmoving. “I—what did you ask?”

She was losing her connection with reality in both magical and literal ways. “Cut her out? Cut you out?” I asked.

“I will live. Her first.”

“What about you? I can’t just leave you here if it’s—what’s it even doing? Choking you out? Talk to me. I can draw up a ward or something for you.”

“She’s…migi, yonjuu, gojuudo.” She was silent for a long moment, and in that time I understood that she would not allow herself to be helped before Yuuka. “Forty or fifty degrees right from where my head is pointing. About twenty meters kata from the edge of the roof. She is not fighting it, Ezzen.”

“…Alright. Let me at least move you a bit.” I grabbed her shoulders and rolled her over so she was facing up as something grim and furious settled in my chest. “Okay, uh—I’m—I guess I’m going to do it now. Try to get through, get to her.”

She stared at the sky as she spoke. Her mouth didn’t move with her reply. “Try.”

I babbled out the plan. “Okay. I’ll get her, then you, then we’re getting the fuck out of here. So, rain step,” I reoriented. “Get my spear to the other side of the fourspace barrier which is hopefully also the net, then teleport across. Should work if I can figure out exactly where I’m going ahead of time,” I hedged. “I just need a gap wide enough for the spear to get over there.”

She didn’t respond. I had the horrible feeling she couldn’t anymore. But she had given me a target to aim for, a place to scan and find the exact location of Yuuka’s pod so I could shift my spear straight there instead of merely across the barrier. I looked at the spot she indicated and ignited my Flame, preparing to weave—

We had thought the net-entity was limited to the physical three-dimensional boundaries of the building, which was why it hadn’t attacked us for the past few minutes. But my Flame was a beacon, a lighthouse, plainly visible to such an extent that it could illuminate even Yuuka’s foresight. So when I ignited my spool of thread, it lit me up like a Christmas tree in whatever ripple-senses this thing had. For the first time it understood that there was an “outside”, that there could be food out there.

Space distorted. The mindless intelligence of this ambush predator converted red ripple to orange and reached outside of itself, extending a metaphysical limb of hunger to grasp my little area of “outside” and drag it “inside.” The roof collapsed beneath me as well, of course, but what happened this time was profoundly more paranatural. That frantic half-heartbeat of sudden weightlessness saw the treeline around me contort in dizzying vertigo, bare branches folding and rippling downward and inward.

Before I had even begun my first glyph, I was falling into the gullet once more.

I did not consider myself good at being fast. A life lived on the forums meant I was used to having time to consider, to pause, to zoom out and decide what I wanted to say or how best to approach a particular knot of glyphcraft. I thought of myself as a slow thinker, a problem solver given to contemplation punctuated with flashes of insight that gave me the chance to repeatedly optimize bad ideas into better ones. I rarely knew what to do and exactly how to do it, and tended to second guess myself and weigh my options even when it seemed like the best option was plain. Since being flametouched I’d discovered that I also had a rather serious impulsive streak, but that wasn’t quite the same thing as being quick on my feet; that tended to be “not thinking” rather than “thinking fast,” and by now it had repeatedly bitten me and taken chunks of flesh with it each time. True urgency, where I had to be clever quickly, was a growth point for me, in my own estimation.

I hadn’t given myself enough credit. I absolutely did benefit from time to think, and those few minutes of talking with Izumi were all the preparation I needed to make this different from how helpless I’d been on the way up. In that split second of the rooftop turning to rubble, before I hit the net again, my mind made a series of intuitive leaps. Ideas strung together in my brain faster than gravity could pull me into the gullet. Pain; red ripple; pure red ripple; red-consuming ward; red to orange to separate me from the net; using {DIFFERENTIATE} for the spine would pigeonhole sufficiently; use a 4-1 Z-twist. Alt-M, G, right click, T, left click, stretch my left hand a bit for alt-E-M-T.

Muscle memory translated that abstract GWalk intention into thread. Too slowly; one second of falling became two, and pain slammed against the battered bulwark of my mind. My eardrums felt like they would burst. Something wet was dripping out of my nose and I was going to die and it would hurt the whole time and it saw me—and all the while my hands kept moving. Back, forth, around, in just the right shapes with just the right tension. Glyphs had to double back on each other with specific angles, layering, ordering. The pressure kept ratcheting up, the gasworks of my soul creaking and shuddering under the flood of agony eagerly shared through the net.

My hands slipped; my movements became shoddy. Thread went to the wrong places, my desperate haste birthing misaligned and ugly approximations that I hoped against hope would be good enough. Too sloppy, my lack of skill laid bare when it mattered most. It was not possible to complete the ward properly before I succumbed. I would die painfully to my own novice incompetence.

And yet, the glyphs did come together. The pressure did abate, leaving me strangely hollow for long seconds, all my mental and emotional systems still suspended in that moment of desperation to escape the pain. My faculties returned haltingly—my eyes saw structural charnel writhing around me, within arm’s reach and no closer as it tried to swallow me, crush me to a pulp and drink me down, all pretense of an organic pitcher plant gullet abandoned in favor of raw hunger. But I’d managed to block the building, and the net, from touching me with my slapdash recreation of a mantle pod’s most essential protection.

The ward sparked around me with little bits of blue ripple, surplus leakage from the red-to-orange conversion that was using the net’s own energy to keep it from entering the space around me. It wasn’t perfect; my foot hurt from the tiny fraction of red that was still leaking in, and some of the output blue was giving the air the distinct scent of ozone as it broke down the volatiles in the air, a warning of how it would kill me violently if I was still present when it collapsed, when it would destabilize under the strain and slip from orange-dominant to blue-dominant. The back of the napkin said I had at most twenty seconds before the equilibrium failed.

So there was no time to marvel at my unlikely success of dexterity or savor the pain’s retreat; I had to get to Yuuka, free her, and get us both out of there. The good news was that I was at least within the building’s three-dimensional space once more, so all I had to do was get my spear across the fourspace barrier. Even with the ward, I didn’t dare chance pushing myself across directly; my ward’s spatial distortions would not protect me so close to that jagged, ill-behaved seam where the fourth dimension had been stitched to ours.

I had been hoping that I could find the optimal transit location, the place where the boundary had the simplest geometry and the net had gaps in its coverage—nowhere near enough time for that. Nor did I have the time to scan for what the net was doing in fourspace between the boundary and the pod. I’d just have to send my spear straight toward Yuuka and it’d cross the barrier wherever it crossed the barrier.

Finding coordinates for Yuuka’s pod was easy, at least. I already had a rough idea of where to aim, so with her ensnared in the net, I was certain to find her at the highest nearby concentration of red ripple. I’d just get the coordinates for that, have my spear transit the boundary and move through fourspace to that point in a straight line—a true straight line, not the chaotic geodesics of the fourspace continuum, which was insanity to attempt—then I’d rain step to it.

Four diagrams of ripple meters flashed through my head; I picked the one with the fewest second-order glyphs and got my hands moving while I decided on the actual input parameters. I targeted a five meter hypersphere around the three-coordinates of the point on the roof Izumi had indicated and shunted thirty meters kata—the standard offset the pods used, far enough to be unassailable by most weaponry that could even skim the barrier but close enough that control wasn’t disrupted. And since I only cared about the point of maximum ripple density and not the information for the whole region, I could cheat the hierarchy and cut out a whole {DISTRIBUTE} from the standard design, saving precious seconds of weaving as the building tried to crush me to a pulp and the ward continued to deny it.

It at least had the decency to fail slowly instead of all at once; grasping fingers of stinging agony were steadily crawling up my leg and the taste of iron had crept into my mouth from no apparent source. In the corner of my eye I saw little shreds of skin surface from between the churning rubble. Instead of dry corpse-leather those glimpses of flesh looked supple and inviting; some other fragment of the memories that had made it. It felt like the building was gaping its maw at me, saying come on inside, won’t it feel so good?

I pushed the grisly temptation aside and screwed my eyes shut to keep imagining the GWalk window in front of me, the flurry of keyboard shortcuts to insert and connect and parameterize everything. I fed the target coordinates into the most blunt and fundamental kinetic shunter possible, barely more than a vector. I sometimes reflected that throwing rocks was the beginning of human warfare and had stuck with us in one fashion or another all the way to the advent of magic; glyphcraft was depressingly, tellingly well-suited to the task, stripping out all the hardware of muscles or lever arms or gunpowder and leaving just the pure intent. Direction and magnitude, target and force.

It was with that intent that I wove. I was barely even aware of what my hands were doing at this point, giving myself fully to the command window and sub-panels, keystrokes rather than tension, dialog boxes rather than self-intersections, the need to help Yuuka rather than the temptation to let this entity flood me with its energy and fight it on its terms. I blotted out as much of the world as I could, everything but the taste of blood and scent of ozone in my ragged lungs.

I wouldn’t realize until afterward that I was rediscovering one method of snapweaving from first principles. Glyphs were a language that both I and the Flame understood, an abstraction to bridge from intention to design to ripple via preordained arrangements of extruded thread, and I was discovering that the physical act of arranging the thread was something my Flame itself could handle, was eager to handle, as long as my intention was pure and my designs ironclad. Which they were. My hands still moved, but it was only in the broad suggestion of the lattice rather than each parameter and detail. The luminous threads followed along the chain of my intentions to fill in the gaps of their own accord.

That was for later. I was so close now, seconds before the ward reached the critical failure point—a thrum of foreign heat rolled up my spine, too molten to be distinguishable as pain or pleasure and either way deeply unwelcome inside my frail sensorium. It failed to break my concentration. I summoned my spear at my side, confined against me in the shrinking bubble of the ward, and imagined it into the interface. C, T, Escape, Enter, Enter, and it was designated as the payload. The last turns of thread tugged themselves into place.

That was the end of the lattice. It triggered immediately and violently. My spear launched as though from a ballista in a tremendous shock of motion and a muted snap of rushing air, vanishing from right against my body in what my senses firmly insisted to be a violent acceleration—but a total mystery of direction since it immediately left my slice of the W-axis. I didn’t get to observe its trajectory from there, whether it had successfully transited the boundary intact and found Yuuka, worse than blind as I forced myself to wait one more second, then two, then three—

The ward collapsed into sparks. Blue sparks, fittingly, so bright that they were visible straight through my eyelids—perhaps even in my eye like Cherenkov radiation, or perhaps that’s what it literally was. Either way, it was my cue. I didn’t know where my spear was, but that didn’t matter. Wherever it was, so was I.

The rain step truly was instant, no nausea-inducing lurch of motion. One moment I was surrounded by a shell of rubble about to consume me, the next I was somewhere entirely different, with my spear in my hand, seemingly whole and unmarred. My false vaet had crossed the barrier successfully; I knew this even before opening my eyes because my first breath was not of ozone but of familiar, oily not-air. I’d never been happier to feel so plainly out of my evolved environment. Victorious relief surged through me even as I brandished my spear in both hands, my carapace-clad forearm still blazing with my Flame, preparing for the net to pursue me, and opened my eyes.

Mercifully, I was greeted by stillness. And horror, more subtly.

Before me floated a thick knot of skin, easily three meters in diameter. Gaps here and there revealed the shine of Yuuka’s pod, the silver eggshell of LM glinting from the light of my Flame but almost entirely choked out by the net’s avarice. A few strips of the skin were furled off in random directions before suddenly terminating in wobbly undulations where they must have been changing direction to move along the fourth axis. Even looking at the thing was suffocating—I remembered a moment during the festival when Yuuka had attempted to restrain Izumi with some kind of LM rope bondage gear. This was that, stripped of all of the performative artifice and instead replaced with pure, greedy hunger, visible desperation to cover and constrict and consume.

It had gotten inside. It was hard to tell at first, but the longer I looked, the more the pit in my stomach grew. The shell was supposed to be sealed in all four dimensions when the Radiances weren’t actively transferring in or out of it, and though the pod was too covered to obviously see a breach, the knot of skin was just a little too oblong to be evenly covering the unbroken pod’s normal shape, too many leathery strands dipping under themselves toward its surface around the same point. Wrapping around the pod had cut Yuuka off from her mantle as it had with Izumi, but getting inside meant it was eating her. Every line of skin seemed to flow inward and upward toward her head.

Toward her eye.

“How dare,” I whispered almost involuntarily, speaking as much for my Flame as for myself. The same repugnance inspired in me by Sugawara was surfacing upon my soul again, displacing the threadbare desperation that had gotten me this far and burning hotter and brighter through me. The eye was the window to the soul, more literally for her than for most, and this thing had colonized it.

I knew what she was seeing, what it had shown me glimpses of in our previous contact: a dream of every atrocity that had made it, collapsed down to a single point in time, its past and present and future all at once, so intensely inscribed in ripple that to Yuuka’s eye it was the future. She could not have seen this coming any more than the building itself could, and once ensnared, it had subsumed her entire reality into the dream.

Hina’s voice returned to my ear, hissing how dare you hurt my sister-wife-friend and growling at me to tear and ruin and save Yuuka by any means necessary.

I suspected cutting her out would kill her, either from unpredictable behavior from her Flame or the simple shock. The entity hadn’t digested her yet, truly made her or her Flame a part of itself as far as I could tell, not yet, but I couldn’t risk killing her by simply shredding this thing, even though in my heart I knew I could.

The entity had already demonstrated that it wanted me. On the roof it had wanted me badly enough that it had surpassed its own nature and moved beyond the boundaries of the building. Perhaps I had taught this predator something terrible, that there was an outside and that there was bright blazing Flame there for it to hunt if it could learn to move and stalk instead of merely wait—but what mattered now was that it hungered for me very, very badly. I had lost its attention when I’d teleported, a trick it had likely never seen before, and its attention where I was now was fully focused on Yuuka.

So I made myself a juicier target than her. It was easy when I was angry. I did what was most natural, a mix of reflexes from spear training, inspiration from the Heron, and simple conjoined instinct from my Flame. I shifted my grip on my spear, sliding the contained inferno of my hand to where the haft met the burnt tip, and set it ablaze with all the fury in my heart and the desire to make the false vaet as true as I could, the weapon that was me. The flame leapt along the blackened edges of the blade and for a moment made me feel like a proper Vaetna.

But I wasn’t. Too soft, too vulnerable. I needed armor to match. The bonfire in my chest responded to that thought by racing back up my arm, over my shoulders and chest and up my throat, anchoring itself in every vacated pore where there had once been hair follicles. A thin, cold outer shell of burning energy wreathed my flesh. Perhaps I should have done this from the beginning.

That got the entity’s attention. Some of those outboard strands of leather began to reach toward me, slowly and probingly, more cautious or simply less active than the parts of the net that controlled the building, the pitcher plant. Then that central knot surrounding the breach in the pod began to loosen and unfurl, leather opening up like a nightmare jellyfish. More and more of the pod became visible as the entity opened its true mouth, or perhaps its stomach, revealing the silhouette of Yuuka’s body inside, still utterly surrounded by skin packed within the pod. Now it was plain to see how every flap of skin converged on her eye, using it as a conduit to dream a solipsistic feedback loop of its own past-present-future on loop forever, making Yuuka into an engine of pain.

Those deepest feeders did not detach themselves, but it was enough. I had my opening.

I kicked forward off of nothing, too fast for these lazy feeder-tentacles to react, and plunged my blazing spear into the exposed heart of the pod. Into Yuuka, into her eye. Not literally, just as I had not really stabbed out my own eye when I had first been flametouched, but the same principle. It was a terribly violent connection.

I dove into the dream, spear-first, to lead her out.

Author’s Note:

“honestly about fucking time the main character of this serial does something”
– one of the beta readers upon finishing this chapter

Ezzen is cooking. Literally, it’s being cooked by its Flame. But it’s finally seizing its destiny, and that’s what we’re all here for, isn’t it? Seems like it’s finally also figured out how to do weaving without weaving and the secret is to simply have turbo autism about your particular keybind setup. Yuuka, by contrast is in a bad, bad way, full damsel in distress mode, poor girl. But she’s just having a bad dream, and as we’ve seen, even magical dreams are nothing to a Vaetna.

Lotta yonic imagery in this chapter if you keep your eyes peeled for it. I promise that’s not the only reason it took me two full weeks to write this chapter, but it definitely contributed. Huge thanks to the beta readers for helping me through it!

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April 26, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Slight gore

We stood in the jaws of a miracle. A true miracle, magic beyond Flame and glyphs. For a precious, wasted moment, I could do nothing but stand awestruck at the enormity of what we had stumbled upon. Even Ebi, who shared the ineffable spark which animated this building and for which we had come here, was encoded as glyphs, potential trammeled into the Vaetna’s programmatic rules and principles by Ai’s genius, fundamentally a feat of human engineering. The entity here was something even more significant, truly raw and spontaneous, something which I could not define no matter how long I sat in my room and stared at GWalk. Until now, I had considered “ambient ripple” to be something different and lesser than the magic of the Flame, undoubtedly paranatural and sometimes hazardous but always less significant than a human or flamebearer’s channeling of intent. In this web of murdered skin I now saw the error in my perspective, and behind it, a glimpse of what I was seeking for Izumi’s sake and ultimately my own, and the profundity was such that it felt like the very world was shifting around me—

Wait, no, it was. The building was trying to swallow us. The floor beneath us slanted sideways. Above us, the hole in the ceiling where we had entered rapidly coagulated with more of the net, shifting into our plane of reality to spread across the gap. A torrent of masonry followed, steel and concrete rushing around the flayed skin to lock us inside. The restructuring was violent and ugly, beams bursting out of the walls with all the violence of a compound fracture.

I was suddenly desperately disoriented, looking around and trying to get my bearings. Wonder ignited into panic that I couldn’t find a fixed reference for the motion around me, above me, and beneath me. My stabilizer module was the only thing that remained fixed, my foot doing its best to stay planted on the shifting floor. My spear leapt into my hand, bidden by some unconscious hope that it would provide a more metaphysical anchor—reason caught up and I stowed it again to reach for Izumi instead, whose balance was utterly unchallenged by this impossible terrain as the floor’s collapse reached pitcher-plant verticality and the wall across-beneath us tore itself apart, opening a path to a corridor that was decidedly not a part of any hospital’s normal architecture: a gullet full of bodies.

This was what had become of the rest of Sugawara’s cult. Tangled carcasses rotting in a net, their souls—again, for some iffy definition thereof—siphoned and merged into something lesser but vaster than the sum of its parts. Most of the dead were in various states of undress, matching what I knew of Hikanome’s practices both pre- and post-schism, perhaps the result of mass suicide to follow their messiah or perhaps simply devoured when this thing had reached critical mass. They could stay rotting for all I cared. Sugawara’s beheaded corpse could have been down there too, a nexus or heart for this thing.

But in that glimpse down the throat I saw that there were others, those that could not have been of the cult. Hikers and police, the sorts that went missing in places like these in yesteryear’s stories of grim magic and crimes against death. Urban explorers who had been self-assured that there was no such thing as a haunted house, people who could not have possibly expected the world to produce an entity such as this. They could not be blamed for this, but they had become part of it all the same.

My Flame thrummed in my chest. We would see them done justice.

Well, that was a nice thought. In practice, I was overruled in action by the two VNTs at my side. Something flickered from Izumi’s hand down into the gullet, a plume of inky smoke trailing behind it into the darkness, followed a moment later by a hail of explosive gemstones from Yuuka. Green and crimson light blossomed at the end of the corridor. There was brutal utility in it, no thought to be spared for the innocent dead who deserved a chance at a proper burial away from the monsters. The two Radiances simply saw hell in the tunnel and responded by raining some of their own.

“Up and out!” Yuuka shouted, before a bright and sharp whine cut through the rumbling of contorting masonry and the world turned red as she blasted the ceiling open with a crimson beam. The idea was plain, we would back out and regroup. I grabbed a firmer hold of Izumi, ears ringing too badly to discern what she was saying, and she hoisted me out of danger, leaping upward toward the hole of blue sky Yuuka had carved. Momentum carried us up and out—

I saw it hit Yuuka first, rocketing upward right above us. She suddenly veered off course and slammed into the charred edge of the aperture. LM beat concrete, but like an out-of-control firecracker Yuuka’s mantle careened sideways on impact and, jets still burning at full throttle, crashed into the far side of the still-transforming room in an explosion of rubble. The moment after she impacted, Izumi’s arm went limp around me.

Then it was my turn.

Concentrated red ripple overloaded my meat suit and the soft animal brain inside of it. Blinding pain killed every thought. The world around me vanished and my foot screamed that something was wrong with every nerve it no longer had. My hoodie pocket felt hot, but it was an abbreviated footnote, washed out entirely by the attack on my nerves, and something altogether more paranatural. I was instantly rendered insensate by bile and animal rage that pressed in on me and tore through the bubble-surface of my consciousness.

I did not touch its mind the way I had Sugawara’s. It did not have one as such, merely a chorused awareness, a shattered mirror. But in aggregate, it did know things, was capable of experiencing and feeling and remembering and inflicting. It experienced death, hallways empty except for corpses with wrists freshly slit and the last echoes of rapturous, desperate, deluded conviction bouncing down the corridors from vocal chords freshly fallen silent, a cult’s final act. It remembered where every flap of skin had come from and could not help but show me each motion of the knife, the knives, all dyed so red it couldn’t not be shared. It had inherited a faint, sadistic pleasure that it was inflicting this upon me, that I would understand all the giving and receiving and the rapturous blood, that I would know that these were all that could exist.

Through the invasive, inviting agony, I clenched every muscle in my body and just tried to keep my mind from unraveling. I couldn’t hear what my Flame was saying beneath the torrent of wanton nightmare, unable to discern what it wanted—perhaps it would destroy this entity out of the same repugnance with which it had burned Sugawara, or perhaps it was so enticed that it would join with it. I could not know. But either way, if it were allowed to fully feed on these sensations, it would bring cataclysm—do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, instant inferno. Either way, I and Izumi and Yuuka would die and whatever remained would bring ruin.

So I told myself that the Spire stands. The idea rang hollow and distant, washed out in the crimson immediacy. The pain was now, the pain was everything. It was simply too much.

Any longer, if I had been tangled in the net rather than passing through it at speed, and I would have been toast. My saving grace was that the mantles had gone first and somehow borne the brunt of the web of concentrated suffering, so I instead only received enough of a dose to make me scream my throat hoarse and spasm every muscle in my body before we must have reached the apex of our leap, arcing up onto the roof next to the hole. I don’t remember that part, that half-second lost forever to agony as we passed through the net. But I do remember that it wasn’t a controlled landing, knees and elbows for me and a full ragdoll roll for Izumi. 

Everything was bad for a long time—by which I mean that aftershocks of the red ripple bounced around my system for what felt like days. In reality it was probably closer to ten or fifteen seconds that I spent curled up in a heap on the roof. The magical pain faded quickly in most of my body; it still felt like my foot had been freshly amputated, repetitions of that perfect slice echoing up my nerves and more reluctant to dissipate. So too ebbed the mind-flooding; my image of the Spire was no longer drowned in the torrent of blood. My psyche managed to find its footing on the dermis, and then on the quicksilver bedrock of adrenaline, and I found it in me to roll over and push myself up.

At that point I started to swear, because I had regained control of my voice and it was immediately clear that my stabilizer was fucked. Beyond fucked, actually, rather in the end stages of the process of melting down into a gloop of liquid metal that was burning its way through my hoodie’s central pocket and the skin of my belly. I made a noise of pure get-it-off-me panic and wriggled out of the ruined heart-armor; once it was off and my wits returned, I thanked it for its service, then registered that my exposed shirt had brought with it the smell of charred flesh. But no pain accompanied—a numbness had spread through me, the systems in my brain temporarily burned out except in my foot. That was a hell of a silver lining. I decided that I would simply not look down at whatever had happened to my midriff for the time being.

Izumi was the higher priority. She hadn’t moved a hair in the time it had taken me to recover. I crawled my way over to her, fearing that what had happened last night had just taken place again, kicking myself for thinking it was a good idea to come out here when she was in such an unstable condition. The mantle had stayed deployed this time, which I wanted to think was a good sign, but my knowledge of the mantles’ functionality suggested a bleaker conclusion. Something had gone catastrophically wrong, either with her or with the connection. From what I had just experienced, it might have been both.

“Izumi, hey, hey, up,” I urged the lattice-manifest. “If you’re in there. Can’t say I’m expecting this to work, but feel free to prove me wrong.”

Nothing. Damnable, terrifying stillness and silence. I rolled her over with effort—she was lighter than someone her size ought to be, but that was offset by how I had just been put through the sensory meatgrinder moments ago—and recoiled from her blank, staring eyes. Dread slithered up my neck.

“Oh, fuck. You’re not dead. You better not be fucking dead. We’re gonna have problems if you’re dead,” I babbled.

I understood, logically, that the odds that it had outright killed her were slim. The mantles were designed to be ablative shielding, after all, disposable. But reason could only do so much against the terror rising within me. Yuuka had gone down, too—she was still in there. It fell to me to do something, and I had no idea what.

At this point it occurred to me to do the obvious and slam the big red panic button we’d just installed in my mind. Panic was indeed the main thing I was feeling, tinged with the tiniest bit of humiliation that I needed to use it so immediately. The distress beacon screamed out across the hundreds of kilometers back toward Tokyo—at least, I hoped it did. There was no way of knowing for certain that it had survived intact where my stabilizer hadn’t, no confirmation from Ebi’s end. I fished for my phone as a secondary channel of communication, relieved it hadn’t fallen out of my pocket or been cracked in half by my landing…and then was horrified to find it wet and slippery under my fingers. I pulled it out hastily and found that it was oozing blood from within.

That’s when the fear really set in. I’d always had my phone as a backup, a safe space in my pocket no matter how stressful real life was. Now I was alone out here, isolated and with no way of knowing whether anybody even knew I was in trouble, alone in the woods against a force I categorically did not understand. My hoodie, my armor, had already been ruined, leaving me exposed against the cool air. My spear had appeared in my hand, but what use was it against a foe such as this? The Vaetna, Heung and Kat, they dealt with infernos by striking at the burning heart, and I now knew with certainty this thing did not have one. Sugawara’s grisly unmaking had not been in the avalanche of death that had been forced into my mind—that had been separate, a working of blood magic he had orchestrated toward a specific end, unrelated to this except for shared circumstances. If I managed to fight my way down to that room somehow I would find only remnants of that trick, not something to stab. And the idea of killing anything with this spear was in itself absurd, this piece of wood I’d carved from hardware store lumber in naive aspiration. Like me, it had not really become any more than that, for all the burnt end superficially resembled that of a vaet and I a Vaetna.

And, perhaps most insultingly, I couldn’t even get to my feet, crippled by my dependence on an augmentation that had never been stable enough to see me through even the danger we’d known was coming, let alone the thing I faced now.

I was a larva, helpless, exactly as Yuuka had said.

Fuck that, argued Ezzen, the ideal Ezzen, genius of glyphcraft and proper heir to the Vaetna, that nebulous shape of unbreakable carapace and sharp killing shapes and possibly boobs. Do something, it said. Destroy it, it urged. I wanted to be that Ezzen, who would be strong enough to annihilate this entity—but I couldn’t just become it, drag that construction of my imagination into reality with all its skill and resolve. Nobody was that magical, not unless I wanted to figure out time travel right here and right now.

A different voice butted in, husky and excited. Hina insisted that it could be done. The power I needed was right there. The power to kill, power from pain, strength beyond mortality if only I would embrace it, if I would dive back in and let go and trust the process. The part of me that wanted her wanted to dive back in the hole. I could fight this thing and win, not as I was, but as what I might become, what I was worthy of becoming. I rose to my one good foot, crutching on my spear, drawn toward the mouth of the monster and the laser-blasted opening in the roof.

I stopped when Izumi’s eyes fluttered. They focused on me and she sat up in one fluid motion, an echo of Sugawara’s corpse. Within me, a different Hina-impulse suddenly overruled the self-destructive hunger: make sure she was alright.

“What happened? Are you alright? Is it just the connection or is your actual—other body in trouble?”

She winced tremendously. “Connection. It is…ah, itatatata,” she groaned, clutching her head. “Tangled.”

I understood, imagining what it might be like for the net to be intersecting my connection with the doll. I was surprised she had any command of her mantle or her faculties at all. “Right, okay.” I knelt next to her, temporarily abandoning any interest in the hole. “That’s a relief, if you’re not hurt yourself. That net is fucked up. How’s the system diagnostics looking?”

“They are…not.” She raised an arm. “Weapons are not working. I think I can move my body, but my sensors are…do not seem good. I have eyes and ears and that is all, no telemetry.”

I gasped, connecting the dots. “Does that mean—did we just somehow do what we came here for? Are you embedded in this body now?”

She paused, eyes widening. “Oh.” Then she frowned. “No. Or—maybe, temporarily, because I am touching to this thing? But I do not want this to be part of me. And I cannot fight.” She nodded toward the hole. “Yuuka-chan is in there. I expect she is worse than me.”

I twisted back to stare at it as well. “Yeah. Fuck. I was thinking of just—burning the whole damn thing. Kind of a moment of weakness in hindsight. I don’t want to take you or her out in the crossfire, especially not if we’re making progress with you, somehow, accidentally and against all odds.”

“You think you could? Destroy it?”

I focused on the waves of pain still coming from where the stub of my heel met the prosthetic and ignited my Flame, pale shimmers of frigid heat venting from the seams in my right hand’s bio-gauntlet. “I think so. Using its own power and trusting my Flame to do what it has to. It’s a bad idea,” I admitted. “But I don’t know what else to do. I’m fucked up too, can’t go down in there and save her either,” I explained, indicating my discarded hoodie with its pile of cooling slag. I held up my phone, which was still dripping blood from within. “And I don’t think we can call for help. Don’t think my distress beacon worked, either. Things are fucked.”

“They are,” Izumi agreed, grimacing. “How did Yuuka-chan’s eye not…?”

That brought me up short. “I…shit, I dunno, that is weird, there’s so much red ripple and she’s still in it. Unless she’s not?”

“You saw her fly off, did you not? She lost her connection as I did. She is tangled as well, or worse. She needs help, and we need her eye.”

“Yeah, yeah, that’s not in debate, I just don’t know what to do,” I growled, frustrated at my own impotence. “Other than hop back into the hole and pray.”

“That’s not the only way to go to her,” Izumi pointed out. “Her body is in the pod.”

“Yeah, thirty meters from us in a direction I physically can’t point to, when you’re immobilized and can’t get me there, great fuckin’ idea,” I fumed. The stress and pain were getting to me; my nerves had begun to un-deaden and remind me of the fact that I’d been thrown bodily a few minutes ago.

Izumi frowned. She reached out toward me, put her hand in my face, and snapped her fingers. A magenta spark flew between them. “Ezzen. You know everything about glyphs. You know how to make a fourth-dimension navigation matrix. Why are you committed to being useless?”

“Because—because that, this thing down here, that’s real magic, and I can’t—this is real VNT shit, and I’m not—”

“Yes you fucking are.” The curse had an incredible, arid crispness coming from Izumi’s mouth, and it stopped me dead. “I can’t believe you talk about yourself like this after everything you’ve done. You are brilliant and strong even when you are not in the other body. Start believing it, stop making excuses, and go save her.”

Author’s Note:

Short but sweet chapter! Maybe one of the tighter chapters of the story? I’m quite happy with it; somebody really needed to just fuckin’ say that to Ez at the end there. The beta readers really liked that part and I hope you do too.

Apologies for the delay! At least this means I get to wish you all a happy Neil Banging Out The Tunes day! As well as the other thing I need not mention. Next week Sunspot will be taking its usual break, so next update will be Sunday, April 27.

Lastly, we have new art! By Togekko, who also did the arc 3 cover and has outdone herself here. Behold Amethyst and Heliotrope, who are definitely the good guys, meting out a little extrajudicial justice!

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!

April 14, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Mild gore (implied body horror)

“Point of order, Ezza,” Yuuka declared, clapping her hands together and pointing at me with them. “If you want to come along, you have to be less abductable.”

“Abductable,” I repeated, thinking it over. “Harsh.”

“Well, if you insist: Peacies going for you in the first place, then I’ll count the kemono reverse kidnapping you, then I think you were fine until the barbie where they did their ‘only flamebearers allowed’ shit to you? Which—anyway, and then Izumi showed up to yoink you. And then again when she busted into the pocketroom, and then just before now? Huh, all of them since you actually got here are her. Maybe it’s more of a her problem than a you problem.”

“Old habits die hard?” I asked, before realizing that I’d rammed my foot all the way into my mouth—an action I could physically carry out, and which would have been only a fraction as embarrassing. I’d been moving into comfortable banter mode with Yuuka and sort of forgotten that Izumi was still right there.

“Dude,” Ebi sniped. “Gender neutral dude, but dude.”

“Sorry, holy shit, I didn’t mean—”

“It’s okay,” Izumi said. I wanted to crawl out of my skin even more than I already had.

Yuuka rubbed her forehead above her eyepatch. “On the one hand, I don’t think Sugawara has access to any more people like Izumi-chan—”

“He will never have another,” Izumi vowed.

Yuuka grinned darkly at her. “That’s what I like to hear. But with the Peacies in town, Ezza, you’re still so…stealable. You’ve got got too many times for me to let you out of the house without more precautions.”

On my end, I was ready to admit she was right; even out in public with Hina glued to me, I felt like we’d been half-assing my safety. “Thanks. I do feel quite…abductable, yeah, good word,” I admitted. Expressing vulnerability around Yuuka was risky, but it really felt like I was among people who understood this. “Not as powerful as I’d expected to be as a flamebearer. Like…hypothetically, if right now I was put back in that situation in the taxi, I don’t know how much better I’d really do. I’m not actually any more effective with my spear if I were to fight back, and I don’t think I’d be able to make any more of an escape. Maybe I’m a bit better at weaving and could get the car underground without losing my foot, but I’d still be trapped.”

“You’ve already lost me on the details,” she said with a shrug. “I never got the play-by-play of what happened with you before our dog showed up. But I get what you’re saying—that’s the way of it,” she sighed. “We’re still just as vulnerable as anybody else until we do something about that. Not even close to all-powerful. You build it up over time, y’see, with traps and defenses and wards. Situational awareness, too, no amount of magic will save you from being where you shouldn’t. But when you’re just a larva, you don’t have those things, so those first few days, and I guess in your case those first few weeks with how much we’ve coddled ya, those are the killer. Too easy to get grabbed.”

Coming from Hina, that might have come off as flirting. From Yuuka, it was unmistakably an expression of hypervigilance and paranoia, one that I found myself strongly agreeing with, both from experience and perennial dysphoria about being exposed. “So are you saying you’ll help me set up my mantle?”

I let quite a bit of hope creep into my voice there. Yuuka surely picked up on it, but waved me off. “No, that’ll take all afternoon, and I really want to get out there while the sun is still up. Ghosts, y’know? We’ll just set you up with the usual distress beacon. Fuckin’ nutter that we didn’t before the barbie.”

“Future-seeing magical girl and you’re afraid of the dark,” Ebi snarked unseen.

Yuuka bickered back in Japanese. I didn’t have to follow the words to understand she was getting at something realer than pure superstition: in places where ambient ripple was already high, it tended to go even higher at night, enough for things to start getting paranatural. After all, if you subscribed to the idea that the ripple field was loosely a measure of how much something “mattered,” as inarticulate as that idea was, then of course it would respond to primordial human fears. Millenia of folklore about monsters and hauntings in the inky darkness, formerly just explanations for humanity’s diurnal fear of predators in the dark, had been granted a grain of truth by the Flame’s arrival.

And Sugawara’s former prison-turned-compound was fertile ground indeed. The residue of his occupation; the hideous things his followers had done to those two Todai employees who had first been sent to check on him; the Radiances’ assault; all had surely left their marks. Even if Sugawara himself, the literal ghost, was gone from there, I absolutely didn’t want to hang around after dark, not as a squishy flesh-person. An armored combat drone, on the other hand…

“Distress beacon sounds good,” I replied, interrupting the playful banter between Yuuka and Ebi. “You got a rack of them somewhere?”

“Ah, nah, it’s a thing you weave. Put that practice to the test.”

“Freehand?” I sighed. “If it’s a thing you set up regularly, you’ve got to have substrates lying around.”

“Surprise exam,” Yuuka insisted. “But you can have a diagram, at least, Ebi will send one your way. While you do that—Izumi-chan, I have a question.” Her voice softened. “You did try to abduct Ezza at the festival. None of us hold that against you. How could we? But we need to know what the plan was. Sugawara wanted them, that much is clear. As a new body?”

“Yes,” Izumi replied with zero hesitation. It was hard to tell from only one word, but I thought I heard rage there. If it had been Alice, the cavernous room would have gone up a few degrees.

“Fucker.”

“Yes. I don’t know the details, how he would have done it. If I did, we would not need to go there now.”

“He didn’t even try when he came here,” I pointed out as I pored over the still-warm printout of the diagram that had dropped onto the counter in front of me. Only twelve glyphs, not too bad. “Plan was ruined at that point, I take it?”

“Yes. He would have needed much preparation.” She went quiet for long enough to make me uncomfortable. A resounding silence of memory emanated from her and hung over us all, negative space left by the barbs and tethers he had put into her. I didn’t want to look at her or interrupt, but the long quiet was unbearable—I raised my eyes and opened my speaking hole a moment after she continued. “I was the best he could do at the moment we killed him. You were there, but you were not subjugated and emptied for him.”

“Neither were you,” Yuuka soothed, then looked at me. “Wouldn’t have worked anyway, right? Because your Flame is so fuckin’ freaky. Burned the shit outta him.”

I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t quite realized that that was the original plan; the others had avoided bringing it up with me in the aftermath, it seemed. A strange, distant perspective took hold of me, one momentarily untethered from my ego as the Vaetna’s heir-apparent and my own aspirations as a VNT flamebearer. “Maybe that wouldn’t have mattered, if he’d had long enough.”

“Dark fuckin’ thought, coming from you.”

“Just—I don’t feel all that attached to my body, y’know? I could—I dunno. There’s a world where if I did wind up in his clutches, then I don’t fight back that hard, I think, and my Flame takes the cue and gives up. Because I’m just a larva,” I spat with more bitterness than I had expected to find in myself.

Yuuka grabbed my arm and hissed quietly, so that only I could hear. “Oi. Never talk like that in front of Izumi. Or Amane. There’s enough trauma about that fucker to go around, don’t go imagining more of your own.” She loosened her grip and leaned back. “Now shut up and get weaving.”

“Right.”

The beacon wasn’t complicated. In fact, it was designed to be as simple as possible, an antenna that sent exactly one unmistakable and unalterable signal toward Ebi, as accurately and loudly and resiliently as possible, through inferno or intentional disruption. Functionally, that meant it was nothing more than a triangulator, signal encoder, and packager, exclusively pink and orange attunements thanks to clever pigeonholing. We planned to put it into my foot prosthetic for this outing, which meant I got to showcase my bizarre, mutant flexibility to bring my foot up onto the table.

Ebi pointed out the obvious. “You really could just take it off.”

“Listen, if I’m stuck in this body, I might as well get to use the damn thing.”

“Ooh, spicy.”

That seemed to dispel the darkness I had invoked. As I summoned forth divine fire from my arm and began to twist it into thread, Yuuka sat Izumi down to confer about what we might expect to find at the compound. The back-and-forth of Japanese was mostly white noise for me, and I soon added to the soundscape with my own muttered babbling.

“Never seen a practical reason for {IDENTIFY} to double back on itself like that.” My fingers gingerly wove the glyph’s shape—I was trying to focus on my movements rather than the hovering arrangements my Flame was leaving behind, envisioning the baseball as I’d been taught to guide my hand’s default position between movements. “Only ever seen it in problem sets and showcasing funny minimum glyph tricks. But I guess it’s a good way to skim off the blue input here, yeah? Resilient in, say, a combat situation where there’s thermodynamic stuff happening all over that would completely mangle how it interprets the pink channel, without needing to actually plug that input with solid blue.”

Something interesting happened as I worked. All told the effort took no more than fifteen minutes, hardly over one per glyph, a record time for me to have woven that many without a substrate. This was more than my few days of regular weaving practice could account for; that had brought some improvement in my muscle memory with the common components of glyphs, crossovers and pullthroughs and particular twists and turns, the physical shapes of the arcane, but there was more to it than that. Something had changed in my right hand. It felt like the only part of me that was really in tune with my intent, really felt like part of me. My Flame had traction on the half-chitinous plating growing from my burn scars in a way it hadn’t before. A lingering resonance of the shape I’d had in the dream, reflected in one of the only parts of my body that matched it in the real world.

It was uniquely rewarding to watch the chain suddenly vanish as I tied off the end, a sign that it was at least a plausibly functional lattice—and somewhat anxiety-inducing, since I was used to being able to pore over my diagrams for as long as I liked. Nothing for it. “Ready to test,” I called out.

“Given it a button in your brain?”

“Yeah. I’ve got this tentative control panel in my head—dunno if it’s good practice to pop this right next to the activatable stuff for the dolldronepuppetmantlewhatever but it’s what I’ve got—and there’s a button there. That’s a good visualization for it, yeah? Just an emergency button that I slam?” I felt like I was talking a lot.

Yuuka gave me a thumbs up. “Yeah, panic button.”

“Hit it,” Ebi called out. I did, imagining slamming my hand on the control panel, and I felt a strong jerk in my foot for a moment, then Ebi emitted a ding. “Yep, works. Next time you hit it I’m gonna assume it’s not a drill, got it?”

“Got it,” I replied, slightly giddy. “Wow, real magic. And stuff I’m taking with me instead of toys I have to leave in the doll.”

“Says the one who can rain step,” Izumi put in with a grin as she hopped to her feet with that mantle weightlessness. “If you are ready, so are we.”

I slid off my chair gingerly, making sure that my prosthetic still worked for its intended purpose. It did, mostly, with the tiniest hitch as I put my full weight onto the toes. I reached into my pocket and touched the tuna-can stabilizer, and found that it was warm. Not alarmingly so, but warmer than it had been previously. The lattice was starting to decohere, spitting blue ripple that pigeonholed into its mildest effect, simple radiant heat. I didn’t think much of it; this new unit Hina had given me post-barbecue had generally run hotter, because it was even more of a temporary solution than the first one, intended to last only until Ai had a more integrated prototype ready.

It was concerning in a distant, deal-with-it-later way. And it wasn’t like there was anything to do about it right now, since none of us could weave like Hina did on short notice. We’d burn too much daylight fixing it if I brought it up, I figured. It could wait until after.

Idiot.

I rode shotgun on Yuuka’s jetbike. Well, the seating was arranged fore and aft, like a motorcycle or jet fighter, but sitting behind her was still shotgun in my opinion. It was about a ten minute flight to the derelict hospital; we cruised well below the bike’s supersonic maximum speed for the sake of stealth. The bike was almost completely invisible to radar, the naked eye, and passive magical detection at these speeds.

“You know,” I pondered, “none of that really shed any light on why she’s called Ebi.”

“Means shrimp.”

Her voice carried easily thanks to the comprehensive magical soundproofing that surrounded us. I loved that we were able to carry a conversation despite the wind shear skimming off the bike’s angular nose, delighting in how high-tech and comfortable this ride was. If I didn’t look down I could almost forget just how high up we were as the mountains of Japan raced beneath us—no, I chided myself. I had just done some magic, just proved in some small way that I could grow beyond being a larva. I chose to be brave and look down at the landscape, emboldened by my dissociation trick from earlier and figuring I’d already vomited once today.

I was rewarded with quite a view of the Japanese countryside. Most of Japan is mountainous, but from my view they were more like really large forested hills, rather than the craggy Alps or Rockies I’d seen as a kid. There was more brown than green below us; the deciduous trees were still missing their leaves, and we were still a few weeks out from the start of cherry blossom season. Nonetheless, it was an impressive view of nature at scale and a welcome change of scenery from the penthouse. Mount Fuji was plainly visible, too, and I realized that it was my first time seeing it. A tourism milestone to be sure, cropping up in the middle of our mission to unravel the secrets of a ghost.

Eventually acrophobia did threaten to upset my stomach and I did have to stop looking down, which reminded me of where I was. It was remarkable that Yuuka was willing to chaperone me like this, given that my body was currently a disgusting mound of meat seated in arm’s reach directly behind her instead of an androgynous and synthetic puppet with breasts duct-taped on. That felt like a major show of trust, and I was grateful in a way that I didn’t know how to articulate. In fact, it seemed like she had come back to the tower in a real hurry—she was still wearing a stylish college student’s outfit as though she’d come straight from a lecture and the bike had been left running—meaning she was eager to join us in getting after whatever remained of Sugawara’s ritual.

She didn’t have foreknowledge of what we would see, not at a distance; the plan was to park the bike overhead and set up the hovering bivouac she’d used at Thunder Horse so we could take the time to inspect the future by my arm’s glow. Izumi was confident the survivors of Sugawara’s die-hard cult would have moved on, but caution never hurt. We hadn’t ruled out that his ghost could be at our destination. Spirits of the dead supposedly lingered where they died, after all, at least according to basically every culture’s folklore. Whether those rules held true for a transmuted entity of Flame was anybody’s guess, but worst case scenario, two mantles—two Radiances, if I was to be honest in how I was thinking about Izumi—constituted almost laughably big guns to bring to any engagement short of a naval battle. If Sugawara was waiting for us, the only misfortune that would occur would be that Amane would never get the chance to finish him herself.

The second Radiance was flying her own route separate from us, both to avoid arousing suspicion and because she had an errand of her own. She’d wanted to make a stop at the burned-out shrine where Hikanome had been founded, to check up on the traps she and Yuuka had left there the other week. Just to reassure herself, she’d admitted openly.

“I knew that,” I replied indignantly. “Is it just a joke about how she’s actually quite big? Jumbo shrimp?”

“Partially. You went out and saw her, those crazy tiny weaves.”

“Yeah. Ai did some blood magic, it seems,” I probed. “Is the name some Japanese pun on that?”

“Oh, I don’t want to spoil the joke,” Yuuka sighed. “It’s the only good one Ai’s ever made, and I want to give her that much.”

Fair was fair. I wanted to ask Ai directly about it all anyway. We rode in silence for another minute before Yuuka changed the topic.

“So, Izumi took you out to fourspace. Just grabbed you, from what Ebi told me. Couple weeks ago I was getting stabbed to stop her from yoinking ya out of the world, now we’re just letting her do it.”

“I thought you trusted her? Are we still suspicious she’s some kind of mole?”

“Oh, no, no, definitely not,” Yuuka said quickly. I couldn’t see her face from the backseat, but the way her twintails shifted suggested a playful roll of the eyes. “Just thinking about how the kemono is rubbing off on her. In all senses of the word. Listen, if either of them grab you when you don’t want, you slam that fuckin’ button, got it? Ebi will get me, and I’ll set them straight.”

“Ebi was the one who told her to grab me.”

“Gah. You alright?”

“Guess so? Is this…protective older sister energy I’m getting from you?” Yuuka fully twisted around in her seat to look at me incredulously, which made me go, “No hey what the fuck are you doing.”

“I can’t believe you just said that out loud.”

I started to sweat. It had just sort of come out. “I didn’t—”

She grinned impishly. “Sure, why not, as long as you’re not gonna be weird about it. Hina or Izumi give you trouble, Bloodstone-neechan will set ‘em straight.”

“They haven’t given me trouble! If anything it’s like…I don’t know, offgassing their worst impulses on each other so I don’t get turned into a chew toy by Hina. That’s good, isn’t it? As long as there’s no ripple collateral, which they’ve been good about as far as I know.”

“Just trying to look out for you. Boobs club might be a joke, but you’re an honorary one of the girls now.” She raised a finger to pre-empt my interruption with a small wince. “I know that’s not what you are. Just how my brain works, sue me. The choices are girl or enemy, so you’re girl.”

“Fine,” I huffed. “But does that mean you have to rant about my girlfriend and her girlfriend while I’m stuck alone with you a kilometer in the air? Is that the fabled ‘girl talk’?” Star would have a stroke, I thought.

She blinked. “Okay, true. We can talk about something else, though, fuck it, I’ve got plenty of big sister topics. How big are the tits you’re putting on your mantle?”

By the time we arrived I was extremely red in the face—and had begun to cotton on to the fact that Yuuka was doing it to distract herself from what we were walking into. Her anxiety made her precognition worse, so by getting a rise out of me she was actually making it more likely she’d be able to glean something useful now. Izumi wasn’t the only one who was nervous about what we might find. Against all odds, I might have been the least anxious of the three of us as we convened on the hovering bivouac platform, if only by virtue of me being the least deeply traumatized.

We set up shop almost directly above the abandoned hospital. The March sun was already starting to hang lower in the sky, the deepening shadows casting the winter-defoliated limbs of the trees as a vast bramble of thorns that seemed to reach up toward us, our quarry personified in the landscape itself as though he had left a permanent stain on the region. That was all in my head, of course, but not only mine, judging by how Izumi’s eyes darted around the grounds surrounding the building.

“Nothing at the shrine,” Izumi informed us, her mantle in its most tuned-for-killing mode next to me. “It makes me anxious. I would have preferred it if he had triggered the traps and gotten away, because at least I would know he had been there. I do not want to be here when the sun sets.”

“We’ll be gone long before it gets dark,” Yuuka assured us as she unfolded some lawn chairs. “You investigate spooky bullshit in daylight, everybody knows that.”

I nodded, though I had some questions. “Makes us easier to spot though, doesn’t it? I mean, we’re just sort of hovering up here. If the Peacies sent somebody out here to keep an eye on it…”

“Yeah. But we don’t think they did. And we’re pretty cloaked, nobody watching the building with pinkeyes is going to be looking up.”

“Always hated that name,” I groused, aware that she was intentionally prodding me and playing along. “It’s gross. Just call them infomantic sensors or something.”

“Yeah, yeah. Sit down and get your Flame out. Time to rend knowledge from the future with our wicked magicks.”

“Chuunibyou,” Izumi declared with a grin. “I admire that.”

I lit my arm and held it aloft to Yuuka, willing that justice would be served, that we would turn Sugawara’s escape from his end into some salve for his victim. My Flame liked that idea and burned brightly, spilling untamed out of the cracks between the plating. Even out here, in the sunlight, it cast strange, deep, unaccountable shadows in between the retina-stinging illumination, what I guessed were two-dimensional silhouettes of three-dimensional objects out in the fourth dimension, usually hidden from our limited perspective but briefly exposed by the paranatural light. Doing this was one of the rare times I felt properly magical, especially outside of the doll—and moreover, more rewardingly, it was one of the few times I felt like the Radiances needed me more than I needed them.

Yuuka pulled off her eyepatch. Black crystal shimmered with dark greens and then began to glow red. The eye was always active, but now Yuuka was pushing it as she stared into the Flame. Then she strode over to the edge of the bivouac platform to look down at the ruined building below. We were close enough that we could see where Hina had blasted open the wall to abscond with the Todai employee they’d been holding captive. She pointed at it.

“We should start down there. Going straight to the room where we killed him is fuzzy, and I don’t like fuzzy. Gimme a sec to keep trawling.”

While we waited, Izumi came up beside me and looked respectfully at my Flame. We shared a quiet moment while Yuuka muttered to herself in Japanese. Then the sixth Radiance shifted awkwardly. “I’m sorry for picking you up.”

I waved her off. My Flame was being powered by righteous indignation, but none of it was for her. “All good. Ebi was the one who asked you.”

“I still did not think. You’re too forgiving.”

“…Yeah, probably.” Only for pretty girls with trauma, I thought to myself. Maybe the PCTF would send their craziest special forces butch and I’d fold like a house of cards.

We lapsed back into silence. Just as my shoulder was beginning to tire from holding my arm up, Yuuka turned back to us, looking a little sick, and gave her report.

“Okay, no traps, no Sugawara, and either the place is abandoned or we’re about to get ambushed so hard they’ll name a holiday after us, because it looks like nobody came through after us, not the cultists, not cops, not Peacies. It’s bizarre how untouched everything is, and there’s gotta be a reason, but I can’t tell.”

“Spooky,” I commented, not sure what else to say. It was incredibly convenient that she could just copy her notes from the future like that. “But not dangerous?”

“Yeah. So that’s thing number one to figure out.”

“Avoidance field?” I asked. It was possible, through a mix of spatial and infomantic techniques, to make it so that a place couldn’t be found or entered by accident. “Granted, seems like all those groups would have had reason to come here intentionally, so maybe not. And who would have had the resources to set it up anyway? Forget I said anything,” I sighed.

Yuuka waved me off. “Silversight isn’t giving me colors, but just looking down there with mantle eyes—Izumi, see any pink? I don’t.”

“No.”

“Okay, so something else. Fuckin’ cults. Nobody should be allowed to use blood magic but us.” She crossed her arms authoritatively. “We’re gonna take it slow until we figure out what that’s about, why nobody’s at least come in and cleaned up the bodies—good thing you’ve got a mask, Ezza, it’s never good when something smells so bad I can see it. And there’s red everywhere, or at least I think it’s red, so I’m pretty fuzzy on the rest of it. Not new red, though, probably some fucked up ritual shit judging by what they were doing in there. Then we can go through the halls the same way we did last time we were here, fewest surprises that way because the path is pretty bright. When we get to Sugawara’s room…” she winced. “Eye’s giving me ‘Izumi will get the insight she wants.’ Which is vague to the point of making me paranoid.” She took a breath. “So. Either of you want to bail, knowing all that?”

I blinked, looking to Izumi. If she still wanted in, so did I. She shook her head. “No. Delaying would not improve our chances of finding anything, will it? So we do this now.”

“Nah. Glad you agree. I’ll put down the bike on the roof and we’ll get in. If either of you feel anything weird as we get close, you tell me, clear?”

“Clear,” we both replied.

Izumi floated upward, we stowed the platform and got back on the jetbike, and the three of us descended to the compound, descending past the sky-grasping brambles of the treeline and into the clutches of a man who’d thought himself a god-in-waiting.

Touching down was fine. Making our way to where the ceiling had collapsed was fine, and Yuuka and Izumi confirmed it was fine to head in, that there really were no traps. It all went swimmingly and without incident. Until we hit the net.

Yuuka had mentioned something about it when last the Radiances had been here, the strong impression she’d had that there was something that would tangle Hina up if she moved through fourspace. It hadn’t come to anything then; ruthless and overwhelming firepower had made far too quick work of the cult’s loyalists for us to find out what it did. In the weeks since, it must have fallen into disrepair and shifted out of place, slipping from wherever it had been mounted in the fourth dimension and managing to cross back over into our reality in places where the boundary was thin enough. Now we saw it for what it was: strips of skin, knotted and glued together into a lattice the size of a hospital. Nothing so elegant as a proper series of glyphs; this was unrefined suffering, red ripple given the crudest structure and form. I shuddered to think who all that skin had come from.

Whatever nightmare project it had been for originally, it had now settled across the entire building. Across every corpse, too, and the Radiances had left their fair share.

A lattice, a form, red ripple, and the dead. The same recipe as for the grim miracle that was Ebi, for all its simplicity and haphazard chance—the recipe for a soul.

More urgently, the recipe for a building that wanted to eat us.

Author’s Note:

Meat! Meat! Meat!

Thanks again for the follower milestone. I’ve had some people ask me if the reduced update rate signifies that my passion for the story is fading, but rest assured I am still just as excited to write Sunspot as you guys are to read it, and I intend to stick around for when we hit 10k and beyond. If you want that milestone to come sooner, the best thing you can do for the story’s metrics is take the time to write a review! Alternatively, tell your friends about it! Or join the discord (link below!) Even if you don’t do anything, I still appreciate that you’re here reading!

Thanks to the beta readers as always. This chapter took a while to come together and I actually had to pretty heavily rewrite it, but I think it’s absolutely cleared my standards of quality for the story. I really doubt next chapter will go up this Sunday; I’m gonna say it’ll be next Sunday, and if I can get it done before then, it’ll be up early on Patreon.

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

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April 3, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

It is April 1st.

Author’s Note:

The April Sunspot fanfiction contest has concluded! We received over twenty thousand submissions, thank you all so much. We managed to dig through to find the best of the very best, and I want to share them with you all on this first day of the month, so I’ve compiled the winners and put them all into one pseudo-chapter. Thank you to the judges: Mia, Emma, Trollmore, Zak, Doomblob, Zooloo, DeleriousSprite, and mirrormatch.

Wait, what do you mean there wasn’t a contest?

4.13 (Abridged) by shrimposition (Mia)

I stared at the complex latticework encasing the fourspace shell of the building. So this was Ebi’s nervous system, a masterwork of ripple woven together… by Ai alone? How could she have created this, as complex as it is, by hand? It would have taken far too long.

Looking over at Izumi’s face, her eyes were wide open in shock and awe. I’m glad to not be the only one amazed by what I see.

“Nooooo, dude, that’s not me. Look down, you’re looking too high up.” Ebi chimed.

What? What does she mean, too high? I lowered my gaze down to see only more and more complex wefts of flame— until my eyes landed on a ceramic plate with a single, solitary… fried shrimp on it?

Izumi’s eyes widened in raw surprise when she saw the tiny shellfish on a plate, lying motionless.

Suddenly, the shrimp stood upright and whiplashed into the air directly in front of my face.

“BOO!” the shrimp screamed.

I fell backwards onto my butt, scrambling backwards in genuine surprise, hands waffling back and forth on the ground as I pulled myself further away. Izumi shuffled closer to try and help lift me up, but was struggling to use her own arms from the sheer shock.

“What the fuck, Ebi.”

“Haha, GOTTEM! Yeah, I’m a fucking fried shrimp, idiot. That’s just the building security system, I control it with that tablet over there.” Her shrimp body lazily wobbled sideways a few times to indicate a tablet with several touchscreen buttons on it. “Actually, you know, I’m fibbing a bit still. BEHOLD, MY TRUE FORM!”

Mechanical whirring and steam began to emanate from the head of the floating shellfish. Izumi and I stared with wide eyes and gaping mouths, genuinely flabbergasted at what was happening. With a smooth motion, the head of the shrimp began to slowly lift up, steam flowing out over the edges. Trumpets blared from tiny speakers, performing a building fanfare as it slowly and ominously pushed open. We waited for the steam to clear, the trumpets dying out with a humorous flop, only to see what seemed to be a ridiculously small grain of fried rice. The goth almost-radiance beside me was groaning slightly, completely motionless, almost assuredly questioning her own existence.

“Yeah, so, Ai kinda sorta fell asleep eating dinner one night. A whole plate of rice. And she was weaving something during dinner like Alice always told her to not fucking do. All the flame went into me when her hand flopped down onto the plate and badaboom, spontaneous sentient and sapient rice flamebearer!” Ebi supplied. “You should’ve seen Ai when I— haha get it— the tiny little rice grain, flew up and slammed into her face and woke her up. Fucking classic.”

We stared.

“This is my mantle, made it myself. I’ll have you know I tried to become Radiance Rock Shrimp, but Alice wasn’t accepting applications.”

Neither of us could gather our willpower to speak up to the solitary grain in the brain of a floating shrimp.

“Hello? Shrimp got your tongue? Paralyzed in awe of my beautiful form? I was joking about the Radiance thing, y’know.”

Izumi finally stirred and asked the most important question. “So… you’re telling me a rice fried this shrimp?”

I was about to prompt Izumi for further thoughts on the matter—her shoulders had gone rather hunched and I suspected this would be a hard ask—when a new voice joined the conversation, one that was very slightly out of breath, as though she’d rushed over because something went wrong. Or, realistically, rushed over before something went wrong, judging by the Australian accent.

“Fuck, Ezza, we gotta get to Macca’s before the ice cream machine breaks! Come on, let’s hop on the jetbike! Oh, hey Ebi.” She tapped her finger right beside her eye and focused for a second. “Holy shit, they even have Szechuan Sauce in stock. We gotta fucking go!”

Sunspot by (Emma aka th3saurus)

A chorus of distant screams woke me from the catnap I had been taking under the canopy of Yuuka’s jetbike. Beyond the noise, I could immediately tell that something was wrong, since I was pretty sure that I had only been out for a few minutes, but it was already completely dark. The air was cold too, and very still.

In front of me, Yuuka was sprawled in a heap. Some kind of black fluid leaking from her crystal eye had formed a puddle around her prone form.

“Porcelain…” she muttered weakly. “I should have known. Why could I not see it until it was too late?”

“Yuuka, what in the hell is going on? Did we get sucked into a pocket dimension again? Is there someone other than Miyoko who can do that?”

“Look up, Ezza. It’s over. It’s all over.”

I looked up.

A trapezoidal shadow hung unnaturally in the sky. Only a slight silvery shimmer around its edges betrayed its true nature. It was a massive celestial object, and it was in front of the sun.

“So we’re in the middle of some kind of unnatural solar eclipse? Did some flamebearer put that there? Did it fall out of fourspace or something?” I desperately inquired.

Yuuka shook her head somberly, which caused a small ripple in the sludge that had gathered around her cheek.

“I don’t think you understand the significance of this. It’s here, and that means everything is over. A secret none of us were supposed to know now stands naked before us, and none can endure its madness.”

“So what is it? Am I allowed to know? Should I have already been able to guess?”

“It’s the Pot, Ezza. The Sun’s Pot.”

I gasped in understanding as the universe winked out of existence around me. It hurt a lot.

*

A pinching sensation in my left hamstring yanked reality back into place, and I yelped as my eyes snapped open.

Yuuka was cackling in the seat in front of me as I tried to work the knot out of my leg.

“You really think a leg cramp is so funny?” I snapped at her, but I couldn’t quite manage to pull off an angry tone through my relief to see the brilliant blue sky around us once again.

Yuuka nodded vigorously, her face split by an unfamiliar toothy grin.

“You’re too much sometimes, Ezza, you know that?”

“So I keep hearing. It was bad enough when it was just my inner demons and five or six dedicated keyboard warriors heckling me.”

“Did you know you talk in your sleep? You were muttering with your squishy little face pressed against the console. Something about the sun and a spot. Please tell me Hina didn’t trick you into trying that whole perineum tanning fad. Actually don’t tell me. I don’t wanna know. Forget I said that.”

We were both quiet for the rest of the flight. Had my social awkwardness rubbed off on Yuuka somehow? I dismissed the thought. She must have just been teasing me and the bit got away from her or something. I don’t talk in my sleep.

The Doomsday Guide to Glyphcraft (trollmore)

“Hina’s gone,” were the words that almost ended the world.

I’d been making a midnight snack in the kitchen when Ai came and got me. I turned and met eyes with her.

“Then it’s time,” I replied.

I finished the omelet I was making, savoring the scent of the bell peppers and onions, then we quickly scarfed down our portions, grabbed a couple of energy drinks, and descended to the lab.

We swept into the room, dropping simultaneously into adjacent seats at the computer bench. I had GWalk up and running in moments. Alice had sent Hina across the globe on a reconnaissance mission, but realistically we only had twelve hours to pull this off.

“You take the chassis,” Ai said. “I’ve got an idea for the gravitational system.”

I grunted in acknowledgement, my fingers already flying over the keyboard.

Visualizing how the fourspace components would work was a little difficult, but I knew I had to start with a good old {MANIFEST}-3 system attuned to orange and scale up. I glanced at the clock. I had time.

*

Bright the vaunted halls of the Spire, brighter still the council chamber where the Vaetna sat in troubled judgment. It was a place of serenity and a place of power, cream pillars and white walls arching over a console at the center of the ten-sided room. It was here that the fate of the world was decided, here that a soft-spoken word could carry the doom of nations.

But as Sani entered the chamber today, he saw those august walls were stained.

“Bri, what the hell,” Heung said from beside him.

“What did I tell you guys?” Bri screeched. She was wrestling with Sahan, trying to keep him away from the source of the… desecration. “This room is perfect for gamer lighting!”

RGB lighting blazed from behind her, turning the chamber into a riot of color. Undecorous. Sani radiated disapproval so hard that one of the LED strips shorted out.

Heung rubbed his chin. “Actually, you know what? You were right, Bri. I dig it.”

Sani shot him a look of profound betrayal. Sahan threw Bri off and launched himself toward the LEDs, but Bri tackled him before he could make it.

Mayari was the next of the Vaetna to arrive, casually jaunting through fourspace to bypass Sani and Heung. They’d stopped right in front of the door, blocking entry.

“Oh, you tried the lights,” she said.

Sahan went flying past her. She absent-mindedly snagged his leg with one hand and tossed him back.

“Now that’s just tacky,” Reggie said from behind Sani.

That was everyone who could be present today. Sani descended to the floor with consternated dignity, not breaking stride when a ballistic Bri bounced off him. He tapped his foot once.

The chamber instantly fell quiet—and white, Bri shoving her ‘gamer lighting’ into fourspace—as the assembled Vaetna each found their customary seat.

“The Spire stands,” they all said in unison. The proceedings had begun.

“Two hours ago,” Sani pronounced, “our early warning systems detected a surge of ripple from Japan.”

A holographic model of the world {MANIFEST}ed from the console in the center of the room. An orange dot blinked in the indicated location, sending waves across the globe.

“Todai,” Bri said, frowning.

Sani inclined his head in acknowledgment. ”As of thirteen minutes ago, we have indications that whatever they’re working on is going critical.”

*

“I mean, it’s Hina,” I argued. “Having a backup cross-spectrum {DISSIPATE} foil isn’t a bad idea.”

There were now three empty energy drink cans on my desk. Ai had been scrupulously disposing of hers. We’d colonized five additional computers just so we could have different components up at the same time, rolling our chairs back and forth as we madly threw the design together.

“Not in theory,” Ai said, rotating the GWalk model. “But with our current design it’ll affect the way the energy flows across the {IMPEL} subsystem. See, we’re right up against the {TRANSMIT} glyph for the red shielding.”

“Why can’t we use a {DIFFERENTIATE}-{REFRACT} on that?” I said. “We can tune it to minimize inter-red interference.”

Ai chewed her lip, mentally adding the components to the system on the screen.

“It’s possible,” she said at last. “Let me double-check the tolerances on that. Your reactor design scares me.”

“Only the best for Hina,” I said with a slightly manic grin.

Sleep deprivation and the high of hyperfixation were getting to us both. Ai giggled.

“So that’s the armor and venting systems handled and you’ve got self-repair almost done,” she said. “This thing should be indestructible against anything less than a Vaetna or two. What’s left, the lasers?”

“Soooo many lasers,” I said, reaching for another energy drink.

*

“What does Todai need with a doomsday weapon?” Mayari asked. “That’s not their ethos.”

“Ezzen must be involved,” Reggie said. “This business with the PCFT might have pushed it to desperation. Not to say I told you so—”

“The past is the past,” chorused Sahan, Bri, and Mayari.

Sani drew their attention to the globe with a gesture, where a giant spike of blue had joined the orange. “It seems clear they were building a weapon and something went wrong. Kat’s patch job should inure us to undesirable contact effects with Ezzen’s Flame, but we’ll need to be careful.”

“Assuming we deploy,” Mayari pushed him.

“We have to,” Bri said. “Look at that spike? They don’t have that handled.”

“We just agreed to let the other Flamebearer organizations shoulder their share of the world’s responsibilities,” Reggie argued.

“Maybe Todai’s shoulders are at capacity,” Heung said with a shrug.

Bri raised one hand above her hand, level with the floor. “Big spike. Biiiiiig spike.”

“All in favor of deployment,” Sani said, raising his hand.

Four to two, the decision was made.

*

We’d skipped past the lesser fabrication equipment and gone straight to the big one in the back of the lab. We fed sheet after sheet of reinforced steel into the fabber, which spat back precision-shaped components covered in carved glyph channels. Ai handled that part. I was already spooling my Flame to power this beast.

We were eight hours into our all-nighter, and there was a real chance of messing something up out of sheer sleepiness. But Hina could be back any moment, so we had to grind this out before she could see what we were doing.

The reactor had a two-hour spin-up time, so I got that kickstarted as soon as possible before assembling the rest of the chassis. The full form of the device was taking shape, at least the parts of it outside fourspace. Hina was going to lose her mind.

It took about an hour and a half for things to go wrong. The reactor finished spin-up early, or so I thought, but when we test-fired the lasers—the lab momentarily became a rave—warning alarms began to sound.

“The gain’s too high,” I realized out loud.

“Ezzen!” Ai hissed. “I should never have okayed that design.”

“It worked on paper?” I said weakly.

“How do we turn it off?”

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” I said, reaching for the safety panel. “It’s just in… here.”

My fingers slid frictionlessly off the panel.

“Um, Ai,” I said. “The shields are on. Like. Over the access panel. How do I turn them off?”

“There’s a switch,” Ai said, color draining from her face. “It’s under the access panel. Why did I do that?”

“Oh,” I said, stomach sinking.

“That reactor’s going to explode, isn’t it.”

“Yep.”

We’d built the defenses on this disaster to stand up to Hina at her most uninhibited. No one else was going to be able to stop the chain reaction—oh god, why had I decided to use pink for this design? I was about to cause a second Dubai right in the middle of the Todai building.

“Ezzen—”

“Calling her now,” I said, pulling out my spare foot to phone Hina.

The call didn’t go through. I looked up at Ai in horror.

*

“There’s only two of them in the building,” Sahan said, accelerating his speech as the Vaetna typically did when operating off-stream. “Their heavy hitter’s gone.”

“Isolate them. Bri, communications interdiction,” Sani ordered, and instantly felt Bri’s Flame flare beside him.

“Dome’s up,” she said. “Just in time, I caught an outgoing call right when the dome closed.”

“Taking us in,” Sani said, raising his vaet.

To the Todai Flamebearers in the lab, it would have seemed like they simply appeared, four Vaetna surrounding the device where there had been nothing the instant before. They stepped out of the rent Sani had carved in reality, the transition so seamless that it took a good second before Ezzen and Ai reacted to their presence. The Radiance dove into her mantle, whereas the orange-haired Flamebearer gave a shout and summoned its spear.

Sani ignored them, staring at the abomination in the middle of the lab.

“What have you done?” he said.

“Gomen’nasai,” Ai said, bowing repeatedly.

“It’s… April first,” Ezzen said morosely. “It’s Hina’s birthday.”

“We know,” Heung said, holding up a plastic bag in the hand that wasn’t holding his spear. “I brought party hats.”

“Why does Hina’s birthday necessitate this?” Sani demanded.

“Oh, I see the problem,” Bri said, strolling up to the device. “You made a typo here.”

A flick of her vaet, passing through the shields like they weren’t there, altered the flow of energy inside the device. The alarms stopped.

“Wait, wait, I get it,” Heung said. “It’s a fourspace cat tree!”

“With rotating laser emplacements?” Sahan asked skeptically.

“It’s like how cats get excited about laser pointers,” Ezzen said. “Except these ones can melt your flesh. Because Hina, um. She.”

Its face reddened and it avoided eye contact.

Sani pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Just don’t do it again,” he said, adding “I’m going to go lie down” to his teammates.

He teleported out, ignoring the party hat Heung offered him.

When the others returned hours later, Sahan was still wearing his party hat and Bri had lipstick marks on her carapace.

Serenade (Zak)

I call you when I need you, my heart’s a-flame

You come to me, come to me wild and wild

When you come to me

Give me everything I need

Give me a lifetime of promises and a world of dreams

Speak a language of love like you know what it means

Mmm, and it can’t be wrong

Take my heart and make it strong, cutie

You’re shrimply the best

Better than all the rest

Better than anyone

Anyone I’ve ever met

A Very Odd Invasion (Doomblob)

I was enjoying breakfast in the kitchen with Hina and Ai when the alarms went off. I knew that Todai had a security system, but this one was new. Everything went amber, and Ebi’s voice called out over hidden speakers. “Warning. Scar breach eminent. All non-flamefall trained personnel take shelter now.”

After taking her time wrapping and shoving the french toast in the fridge, Hina teleported us to the roof. Alice, Amane, Yuuka, and Izumi all emerged from the stairwell door moments later, in varying states of undress.

I blinked twice, shoving the thought aside. “So if the Scar is breaching, why does everything look fine?” I asked, pointing at the giant tear in the sky that looked the same as it did yesterday.

“That’s a great question, Ezzen,” answered Ai, having pulled an entire laboratory out of her pockets. “Everythings reading correctly, no ripple other than us… Wait, what’s this 3space fold?”

No sooner had she spoken the words than a giant UFO appeared in the sky over Tokyo, blotting out the blue sky and puffy clouds. Amane immediately mantled up, weapons ready, and Hina’s hackles rose as she growled.

“What the fuck?” asked Izumi, frozen.

It was a valid question, as none of us had seen anything like it before. And now there were… concert lights coming from the bottom of it? Was that kpop?

“What the fuck is going on?” echoed Alice, standing mantled but frozen. In response, a giant blue beam appeared out of the bottom of the ship, lowering a figure to the ground.

Yuuka just looked grim. “It is as I foresaw. We must go there, quickly!”

The radiances followed, our mantles speeding the journey to street level. There were actually three people in the all wearing tailored blue outfits with blue hair. They stepped out of the beam as the beat dropped, and struck a pose. “Take us to your cheerleaders.”

The radiances paused, but Izumi remained unphased, immediately performing a perfect back handspring as she mantled into an american cheerleader outfit, landing in a perfect “Y” pose, pom-poms out. “Finally! High school!” she cried.

Yuuka nodded sagely, and then we were cheerleaders.

Trans Day of Relativity (EE Sharp aka Zooloo)

Both sex and horror often started with an eager cry of, “Cutie! There you are!”

I looked up from the mantle-designer-thing, whose lack of specificity and description should’ve been the first clue that something was terribly amiss in the lab. There were boobs in the schematic though, which is why when Hina asked: “What are you doing?” I was able to just look up and point to a whiteboard on the wall next to me. BOOBS CLUB read my wild scrawling in thick dry erase letters.

Yuuka had stopped by and underlined it five times in blue, pink, and white. BOOBS CLUB was my answer to why I’d spent most of last night and this morning slumped in a chair with my hands on a keyboard and my eyes glued to aspirations of a heavy chest.

Hina made a little squeak of happiness. “Ooooh! That’s ironic.”

“Did you mean coincidence?” For some reason, I had thoughts about the meaning of the word irony, which conveniently led me to the subject of coincidences. Someone must’ve felt very clever for putting that together. It was almost like there was someone typing away at the keys of my thoughts, spelling out a strained setup to a joke while praying for a punchline to emerge from the drabble.

I glanced over my shoulder at my suspiciously overdescribed girlfriend. More on that below.

“Maayyybe!” she called, interrupting my thoughts for pacing purposes. “Do you know what day it is?”

She was standing in the door, grinning with lots of really sharp teeth. She looked especially pretty today; bright sapphire eyes shone through an effortless spill of wavy red hair, and if I’d had more coffee, maybe I would’ve been able to describe it better. Or prettier. But she had really great hair, and perky breasts too, and athletic but wide hips. Not too much, not too little. Just wide enough. And if she turned around, I’d even see a nice ass. Yeah, I liked that. She was the best, hottest girl you’ve ever seen. Seriously. And the smile on her face was as radiant as it was mischievous.

I cast around for a calendar on the wall, because that’d be an easier illustration of the day, but then I remembered that the computer clock usually had the date. March 31st. “March 31st,” I echoed.

“It’s the trans day of visibility!” Hina yelled. “It’s your day!”

I paused for a moment, uncertain whether this made sense in a timeline of recent events. Wasn’t today the first of April? Or something else? What had happened recently? Why were we looking forward to today? I had the sense that the setting was coming unmoored. In someone’s eager hands, the planned screws and struts of the narrative were being disassembled. Loose parts rattled somewhere in the back of my head.

“I am trans,” I agreed, mostly for the readers who don’t pay close attention. “But I really don’t want to be visible today.” I gestured at the screen with big tit schematics. “Not unless I look like this.”

Hina pouted for effect. “Aww, cutie!” she sauntered into the room, holding something behind her back. “You don’t have to be visible to anyone but me today.”

She stopped a few steps away, and I swiveled the chair about to face her, finally sitting up. “Thanks, I think?” I chuckled, waiting for whatever surprise she had in mind. All of her girly-creeping was adorable, but for pacing’s sake, I couldn’t imagine delaying the inevitable much longer.

“I have something for youuuu,” she said softly, elongating her last word to really stretch out the moment before the big reveal.

“Show me,” I suggested, aware that I wasn’t worried enough for my normal characterization. I should’ve thought that something was really wrong. This entire sequence of events implied a disaster along an axis that was normally beyond consideration.

“I made you a trans flag!” Hina shouted, pulling it around and holding it up to me proudly. For as long as this paragraph takes to finish, I was filled with awe. The cloth was LM, all magical matter, spooled out and then woven into a self-illuminating textile. Pastel blues, light pinks, and bright whites shone with more energy—even more reality—than the rest of the description around it. Bands of rich color cast about the room like layered searchlights, bathing me in the glow of trans symbolism.

“Amazing,” I muttered. “People have been trying for years to make glowing cloth out of flame,” I overexplained, speculating on things that might not be canonically true.

“I just wove enough flame together to make it glow with ripple!” Hina danced around, trailing the self-illuminating flag, casting a storm of banded trans light across the room in a kaleidoscope scramble.

Then it finally hit me in-character. I already knew the truth as a narrator—mostly because the author had known the Bit all along—but now, all of me understood the truth. “That’s not canon!” I exclaimed. “Ripple colors are just labels. You can’t see them. They don’t actually shine with specific colors. They’re like radiation, and they fuck up everything.” Hopefully, my long dialogue read smoothly while explaining enough. The balance was hard to maintain in this metafictional moment.

“Oooh!” Hina said, continuing to be unaware just long enough for me to draw a conclusion. “So how come the flag is glowing then?”

I hummed thoughtfully. “Well, the entire textual basis of this scenario is falling apart, which sounds like a mixture of high entropy and informational distortion. I think we’re soaked in pink and blue, and the fiction is getting strained to the point of metafiction. Even basic details are no longer as important as the Bit.”

Hina’s sapphire eyes literally shone brighter, and she tossed the flag aside, jumping up and down with joy. “The Bit!” she shouted. “The Bit! The Bit! The Bit!”

I didn’t know how this could happen or why it made any sense, but I did know how to handle the Bit. “Just lean into it. Go with the flow. The Bit is really all that matters.”

Hina skittered over and dropped into my lap, sitting sideways with her legs cast over a rest and her back snuggled into one of my arms. “So what’s the joke? Is it a good one?”

With a lapful of warm girl, I debated describing how hot she was again, but I decided that the Bit really was the most important thing at a moment like this. “I think the audience decides if it’s good, but I think the joke is that pink ripple has made us aware that we’re in a story.”

Hina giggled. “Oh, that’s terrifying. So we’re characters in a book or something?”

I squeezed her gently, considering her words. “It’s terrifying?”

“Yeah! We only exist if someone writes about us. Isn’t that wild? We’d stop existing if the author ran out of ideas or decided that we’d done enough.”

“I’m not sure that’s how stories work,” I suggested. “They might be indexical. Pointing to something real in a totality—”

She tapped my nose with a finger. “No philosophy!” she ordered. “That’s not the Bit!”

“Fine, fine,” I said. “Assume that stories don’t have a special relationship to some kind of broader reality. Assume that we only exist in the act of communication. Then we’d be relative—in the technical sense of the word. We’d be dependent on a reader and an author for our existence. If either ceased to be, then we would never be written, or never read, and we’d cease to exist.”

“That seems right to me,” Hina muttered. All smiles were gone. Mortality was the subject of our text.

I continued drearily, spelling out the nature of our doom. “We live in a world that is always about to end, seconds from now. In the real world, a dog barks. Someone calls a name. The reader looks up from this, stops thinking about us, and it’s all over. Not even death. Just nothing. Nothing at all.”

Hina made a thoughtful sound, which was good, because she was about to finally lean into the Bit after I’d failed to vibe with the setup of this short story. She twisted in the chair, on my lap, using her hyperdimensional powers to face you, the reader, who is looking down at the interface where these words exist. A screen, a page, it doesn’t matter. Discard the past tense. She is looking out at you, right now, speaking directly to you. Can you hear her? Is her voice clear to you? Beautiful?

“Reader,” she says seductively, “If I took off all my clothes, right now, and I did something really nasty to my cutie—I mean all the stuff in your favorite fetish, all the stuff that hammers the buttons in your brain, the stuff so hot that it stresses you out because you find it hot—all that impossible sex and whatever else—would we get to exist after the story is over for a little longer? In your head? For like, an afternoon?”

I’m frozen at this moment. The metafiction is nearly at its limit. The writer can’t even guess at what you like, but at least I can finally see the Bit, and I can lean into it. I can make one last bid to exist in your head—along with this world—just one day, one hour, even one minute more. I’m looking where Hina is looking. “That’s a good idea,” I say to you. “Imagine it, Reader. A whole afternoon in the pink, doing whatever it is you’d really like for us to do. All the really weird stuff. Will we exist? If the fantasy ends with an orgasm like a period, will you think of us in the afterglow? Maybe pen us down in a fanfic of Sunspot, branching out our world one more step? Will you get horny to help us stave off oblivion?”

Does that work? Do we still exist? Ah, wait. There’s not much time left in this story. The pink level must eventually go down, and I’ll stop being aware of the mechanics of fiction soon.

That means Hina and I will be together, in the tower, surrounded by the aftermath of your fetish. If someone shows up, it’ll be super embarrassing, but maybe you’ll think that’s hot too. I don’t know. I’m not you.

Too bad though. I might’ve been able to see what you like, explore it for you, but time is running out. Whatever happens next isn’t in this chapter, because this next sentence, just below?

This is the cliffhanger.

Yeenus Deletus (DeleriousSprite)

A wail shook the tower down to its very foundations at six forty-nine AM. Alarms blared, mantles were mantled, and a certain glyph engineer’s bedroom door was soon torn asunder as a stompy bootkicked it in.

“EZZA!” Yuuka screamed while rushing to where it was blearily rubbing it’s eyes at it’s computer rig, “Your godforsaken kemono girlfriend just fucking deleted my Stardew Valley save file!”

“Bwuh?” Ezzen replied eloquently as it took their housemate in, a bit shell shocked from not only the scream, the destroyed door, and the shouting, but also the fact that Yuuka was in not a stitch of clothing besides her stompy boots.

With a roll of her eye, she spat out an explanation, “I was hate-fucking her and when she blew her hyeenis load, it shorted out my switch and my three-hundred-fifty-seven hour save file in Stardew Valley was corrupted!”

Ezzen blinked up at her in confusion, “…and what does that have to do with me?” The color drained from it’s face, “you don’t want me to-”

“No you fucking ding-dong,” Yuuka replied while her pigtails shivered in rage, “you’re going to glyph up a spell to recover my save file so that I don’t have to deal with buying a return scepter again or touch that useless cunt of a mayor’s underwear!”

There was a long pause as everything sunk into Ezzen’s addled, sleep deprived brain. As he opened his mouth to argue that, ‘no, that’s literally not how anything works’, Yuuka chimed in with one last addition.

“And so I can hate-fuck your girlfriend without actually wanting to kill her!”

“But Yuu-chaaaaaan!” a small voice whined from outside the door, “that makes everything even hotterrrrrrr!”

Yuuka’s eye looked as if she had gazed into the abyss, “Ezza, we NEED to cook.”

Ezzen pinched the bridge of it’s nose and sighed, “you have to buy me like three times my weight in starburst jellybeans, and then you have to make a video gag about the lego city river thing.”

“Deal.”

A few minutes later, a small procession from Ezzen’s room, to one of multiple meeting rooms in the penthouse had been made. Assurances to the other Radiances that everything was mostly okay and to go back to bed were given alongside the explanation that Ezzen would be attempting to (Yuuka glared at it until it declared that it would recover it, even if it had to perform surgery on a grape) restore Yuuka’s save file. Which garnered several worrying expressions from the other three Radiances.

Fully engrossed in its work due to the promise of the good jellybeans (not the crap they make at Jelly Belly) Ezzen dove into the theory as day turned to night and then back into day. Barely pausing as Hina force it to eat a famichicki sandwich or three.

But the sauce was deep and Ezzen was thoroughly lost in it.

As day once again turned into night, a different foot kicked the meeting room door down, startling Yuuka awake to find a royally pissed Alice standing in the doorway, with Heung the Rock Johnson standing behind her.

“Yuuka, why are the Vaetna demanding we stop interfering with the laws of causality?”

The sudden scraping of a chair drew all of their attending to a VERY frazzled looking Ezzen who was shivering with excitement in front of a warbling white orb.

“IT WORKS!” the engineer declared through clenched teeth as it’s efforts paid off, “IT WORRRRRRKS!!”

“That would be the thing my spear needs to poke,” Heung drawled as he shoved his way into the room, “also the reason why your save file was gone is because that wasn’t your switch user profile.”

Yuuka blinked for a moment before going pale, “so you mean-”

“Miss Takehara’s six-thousand hour Stardew Valley save file is what was truly lost.”

Discord (mirrormatch)

Ai jolts awake at her desk, her bleary eyes greeted by the sharp gleam of OLED and the scent of energy drink. Through the blur of awakening, she notices a Slack ping, from Alice.

“Alice: Ai, we don’t have an April fool’s story with you in it, yet. You need to do something funny or stupid before the end of the day.”

Ai mulls it over; she’s really tired, and she still has to chase down the slicing bug with her 3D printing bed’s software. And her lecture at 5…

She hastily edits a ping icon into the penthouse discord, and gets to decluttering the wall of empty cans.

Author’s Note:

You may have figured out by now that there was no contest. Happy April 1st! Thank you for bearing with this nonsense; the betas and discord server mods had a lot of fun with this. You’ll get an actual chapter tomorrow, don’t worry! One where I acknowledge that we’ve hit 5000 readers between RR and Shub!

And also chag pesach sameach to those who celebrate, including me! That’s the reason this happened at all; I have been too damn busy with festivities to lock down the chapter tonight as I’d hoped, and the date was serendipitous to do something silly instead. We might run an actual fanfiction contest sometime, one with some manner of actual prize.

For anybody who is still annoyed, please accept an apology art of Ai by myoodles to tide you over until tomorrow’s 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!

April 1, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

None

It was very odd to hold a conversation with a disembodied voice. It lent the impression that Ebi was both everywhere and nowhere, the speakers too numerous and well-hidden to pin down most of the sources of her voice, which was diluted further still by the cavernous spaces of the penthouse, resonant with the hard surfaces of the kitchen and devoured by the many soft sitting areas in kind. It was like the building itself spoke to us—and in a sense, it did.

“So you still don’t have your body back? I really thought Ai would…”

“She’d what? Put me back together again? I’m already together,” retorted the hidden speakers. “Like, dude, think about the words you just said. Is that ‘my body’ or are you sticking labels on stuff?”

“…Ah.”

“Not one body,” Izumi supplied with a grin of camaraderie. “I know what that’s like.”

“Not like me, you don’t.”

She had a point. It was a misnomer to think of her as being either embodied or disembodied. Yes, she seemed to have quietly lost use of, or been separated from, her bipedal android form in the wake of her direct contact with Sugawara, and I was rather upset that my help had never been enlisted to deal with it. But Ebi was bigger than that. She was, in effect, the entire building, and apparently also extended beyond that into the surrounding fourspace. Her absent doll-like teal shell was the sprout, not the roots.

“What’s that like?” I ventured to ask, scanning the ceiling to look for cameras. I couldn’t see any, so maybe she had other sensors; locating and identifying people with infomancy wasn’t particularly difficult when you could set up an array encompassing the entire building.

“Oh, y’know. I’m a big ol’ terrarium full of people.”

“People who mostly don’t know you’re there.”

“Oh, they know. I’m Ebi-tan, building systems and services AI and Amane’s caretaker. That’s something they cover on day one of orientation. They just think I’m a really fancy climate control algorithm and chatbot, not a whole person. Important to maintain that charade, since…y’know.”

Izumi nodded. She’d decided to direct her attention toward one of the visible PA panels, the one between the kitchen and the sitting area, more or less directly above where Alice liked to flop face-down on the sofa. “It works. I didn’t, we didn’t, know that you’re…whole. Is that a good word?”

“Sure. Always wondered if you guys sniffed me out, though. Thanks for keeping quiet about it, if you did.”

Izumi shook her head, her hair following the motion with state-of-the-art physics interactions. “Hikanome? No. You hide well, and I was never looking through the shell when I was here before. Miyoko might have known, but she hasn’t been here since…”

“Before?” I asked, then facepalmed. “Ah, no, stupid question. You’re VNTs, Todai are VNTs, of course you’d have been here for meetings and stuff, yeah.”

Ebi emanated a harsh, digital buzz, the soundbyte for “wrong answer,” which made me flinch for both the sharpness of the sound and the implication. There was a smile in her voice, though. “Way to miss the drama Izumi just dangled, Ez.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. Miyoko hasn’t been here since…? Sugawara was put away? Since you moved in?”

“No and sorta. Specifically since the Blue Spark Incident. That was mass casualty, and she was in here—hospital, remember—healing folks. Doesn’t like it here now, I imagine. There be ghosts. Point is, that means I got away with it, hell yeah.”

“Hell ye—”

“Until Sugawara came in here and walked through me.”

“Oh.” I nodded in understanding. “He messed you up bad, yeah, but he also glimpsed your nature or something?” Worry sprouted in my chest as I glanced toward Izumi. “Do we now have to extra kill him before he tells somebody?”

“Doubt he’s much of a talker anymore. Maybe if the Peacies get their hands on him. They know how to make people sing. Even if he’s only debatably a person. And that convenient segue brings me back to what you two were floundering about. Souls! Ez, do you think he has a soul?”

I frowned at the panel. “I mean, there’s something there, right. Maybe not a whole guy, but I felt something. Scientifically it’s pretty up in the air whether—”

“Izumi, you?”

I crossed my arms in outward annoyance at the interruption, deep down grateful to have been cut off before I could get rambling.

“No. That is Flame shaped like him. That has been…inkanshita?”

“Stamped,” Ebi supplied.

“Stamped, with his wants.”

I took issue with this reasoning. “I don’t know if that’s different from a soul, functionally. I mean, Ebi, if you’re going where I think you are with this, then you’re also Flame imbued with a will, right? And I’d say you’re pretty ensouled, qualitatively speaking.” I blanched. “Er, not to equate you two, since he’s a fucking monster and you’re…Ebi.”

“Hah.” The laugh was mirthless and synthetic. “Okay, time for a visual aid. You’re going on a field trip. Izumi, grab ‘em.”

I managed to yelp out a “What?” before I was yanked by the scruff. Severe motion sickness followed as Izumi dove into the fourth dimension, dragging me away from everything. 

Crossing into the fourth dimension was very…wrong. Physics worked well enough once you were out here—I wasn’t dying on the spot due to catastrophic biological failure, after all—but that membrane between worlds didn’t work right compared to what the math suggested, confounding thermodynamics and both old and new field theory. The physical boundary was too harsh with the sudden disappearance of gravity, the differences in geography too stark for things that should be only meters apart, the locale too alien for what should have been merely a strange extension of Earth. Even ripple was reluctant to cross from threespace to fourspace in the same ways as it usually did—a boon for our purposes, since the mantles abused that property to hide out here, putting distance and thus safety between the pod and the battlefield, but still damning in its suggestion that the fourth dimension didn’t even play nice with the other novel physics of the age of magic.

The entire space, with its floating detritus and the unnerving, back-of-the-neck sense that there was something living out here, was not supposed to be here. It had been stitched to our reality. An ugly stitch, too; tentative models showed that the “seam” had a truly horrendous amount of folding and bunching, far less clean and predictable than any conventional warping of spacetime due to gravity. Anyone who tried to cross it without knowing the local geometry risked being dashed against the rocks. The seam between light and darkness, air and oil, was so tenuously, terrifyingly thin and sharp, a jagged blade to make even the Vaetna blush, and only flamebearers were empowered to pierce it.

That didn’t mean we were naturally good at it. I was, in fact, worse than most at it. Moving in a direction that hadn’t existed in one’s evolutionary history played hell with the inner ear, and the visual chaos of the “flattening” of reality challenged my visual cortex as my eyes struggled to decide which direction I was moving. The two senses agreed I was falling, the eustachian tubes saying that I was in freefall while my retinas argued the vanishing light indicated I was actually being dragged beneath waves. It was not a good combination. I think I screamed before vomiting, and I certainly thrashed against Izumi for a moment.

But only for a moment. Inwardly, I was overcome with resentment at these animal reactions; Hina didn’t have them, and apparently they were much less visceral for the others when they were in mantle. Izumi certainly didn’t have any trouble, tugging me in a straight line as we flew-floated-swam into the abyss. I wish I could say I steeled myself, gathered my courage in my gut and overcame the psychosomatic awfulness through the sheer willpower of a flamebearer asserting their will over reality; what I actually did was disassociate hard, mentally escaping into the reasoning that this flesh body was a deeply suboptimal temporary shell and anything bad that it experienced was a design flaw we’d deal with later. This worked well enough that I managed to still my body and dared to open my eyes and look around as my instincts dealt with retching out the bile.

My vision first fixed on the relatively static and far-off distance rather than trying to track anything nearby. Last time I’d come here had been from the sparse woods and open spaces of Yoyogi Park, and there hadn’t been much out there, just impossibly massive hunks of driftwood and dust bunnies of unknown origin. This time, our transit into the area of fourspace inside Lighthouse Tower brought us to a much more occupied environ. Glowing mats of what I could swear were bioluminescent algae floated far off, some of them in regular enough grids that I suspected they were somehow attached to buildings of the city—wait, no, many of them were attached to structures out here in fourspace, surprisingly mundane boxes of concrete. Here and there longer columns stretched across further distances—perhaps tunnels, I thought. Many of them cut off abruptly and continued to warp as we fell; that was a hardware limitation, my eyes only able to perceive three-dimensional slices of the complete space as we moved along the fourth axis, thus causing the appearance of motion and transformation even in far-off objects that should have had the static safety of parallax.

What I observed was that most of the city, for all it was a major metropolis, didn’t make it into fourspace. Everything that was out here was deeply utilitarian, stripped down to its essentials, the barest outposts of what scientific equipment or infrastructure was worth contracting the nation’s flamebearers and magitech-equipped services to set up. Debris was still everywhere; the driftwood was replaced by what looked like concrete and rebar, evidence of construction or destruction. Very little made it readily identifiable as Tokyo. I spotted several places not too far off where there was some kind of distortion, places where I suspected battle had taken place in realspace and orange ripple had managed to leak all the way out here and now lingered still.

Then we landed on a platform that I didn’t see until right before impact, despite it being as wide as the penthouse’s upper level common area. It had gravity; I felt my foot shake for a moment as the stabilizer reoriented, turning uncomfortably hot in my pocket. Izumi put me down and I was able to take in the tower surrounding us.

Well, it didn’t quite look like a tower. It resembled Lighthouse’s HQ in the same way that a nervous system resembled a body. A network of glowing threads stretched upward around us—I noted with some alarm that our three-dimensional orientation had changed—punctuated by hundreds of boxes that I was recognizing as pocketspaces. The lines were a familiar teal, and mostly changed directions in right angles that clearly sketched out the individual floors and walls of the tower, converging and then diverging again like a dance distributed over space rather than across time. Taken as a whole, the sight was beautiful, for its color and neatness as much as the sheer scale. Ebi was beautiful. And this wasn’t even all of her, since I reasoned that much of her physical hardware was inside the various boxes, things like alternate attachments for her drone body or the entire pharmacy that was somehow stored out here. No wonder she hadn’t really minded me ogling her backside way back on that first day, if this was her true form.

There was also damage. One of the furthest-off boxes, which must have originally been four meters to a side, looked like it had been blasted open from within, and no threads led to it anymore.

“Where Sugawara touched her,” Izumi surmised, gazing up at it as well.

“The part of her that interfaces with the drone, then. Looks like it’s been abandoned completely.” What a saddening thought.

We waited for a long moment for Ebi to chime in. She didn’t. She was right here in a very literal sense, yet we seemed to be alone. She’d called this excursion a visual aid—for what?

I lowered my gaze toward Izumi. “You’ve seen all this before, right? Just as you’ve passed by, coming and going?”

“Yes.”

“Are there other buildings like it here?” I looked toward the horizonless distance again. “In Tokyo, I mean. I certainly can’t see any from here. Hikanome HQ?”

“No. Our temples have some, but this is…different. Look there.” She pointed.

I followed the finger down. First, I realized the platform we had landed on was actually another box, and a solid half of all the threads eventually converged into a few bundles that passed into it. We were standing on the mainframe, or one of them. Then I leaned toward one bundle and frowned in polite incredulity at what I saw, my hands pausing in their absentminded task of fixing my incredibly messed-up hair.

“That can’t be right.”

The threads were not simple, linear threads at all, but entire chains of glyphs woven tighter than human hands ever could. Ebi’s nervous system—because I knew that was indeed what I was looking at—was not only built to a breathtakingly large scale, but an impossibly small one as well, and together the two presented a problem. Even if Ai had found some novel way to make them tiny—if anybody could solve the open problem of a magical pantograph to imitate her motions in micro it would be her—she would have had to weave for years nonstop to create this many glyphs. If she even had that much Flame.

I thought back to the first day we met. She’d claimed the Radiances powered their magic, motivated their Flame, through positive emotions, and Ebi had countered with a very heavy-handed gesture toward the concept of sacrifice, implying…something. That little interaction had mostly fallen out of my mind since then, busy with fresh trauma.That exchange returned to me now as I scrutinized the impossibly compressed chains of glyphs.

I took a deep breath of the oily air as I inspected one of the chains. “Fuckin’…what is this, {IDENTIFY}-{ASSIGN}-something else, repeated like a hundred times with multiplexers on this strand alone? It’s just too much to weave. Not to cast aspersions, but…blood magic, right? Can it be anything else?” I looked toward Izumi, hoping for an alternative.

“That’s what I thought as well.”

“Then what did she sacrifice? And why?” I looked around again. “Because this is insane. I mean, not to be a caricature of myself, but I’m not sure anywhere but the Spire has this much integrated Flame. All to run Ebi? For the…clout of making a true AI, only to keep her secret? I don’t get the point. Er, no offense,” I called out toward the gargantuan lattice, cognizant of her presence. I received no response. “Huh, guess she can’t hear us. I wouldn’t be able to hear something inside my body either, I guess. Though wouldn’t that be cool?”

“Ezzen.”

“Sorry.”

“Ai does not strike me as somebody who would do all of this for ego. Not just to prove she could. She loves magic and technology, but not in that way, I think. Do you agree?”

“…Yeah. And she’s…I don’t know, whole. Amane, Alice, Yuuka, they’ve all got problems or scars, stuff that’s visibly some type of exchange from negotiating with their Flame for the power they have. Hina doesn’t count. For Ai to have done all this and not have sacrificed…Omelas,” I intoned with a heavy heart. “If this is blood magic, she must have outsourced the sacrifice.”

At the barbecue, I’d vehemently argued against the idea that the Vaetna’s power came from some kind of central suffering battery that provided the payment toward the Flame. Izumi had been there, as Kimura. She snorted. “You know, I read that after the barbecue, as something to do to stay awake. I think you missed the point. Have you read it?”

“That’s off topic—” I swallowed the defense. “No. I just…invoked it because I want to think the Vaetna are better than that. And I hold Ai in similar regard. Which is why it kind of sucks that I’m just now remembering she accused them of the same thing, and it’s occurring to me that maybe she was projecting.”

“What did she say?”

“That the Vaetna either broke the rules of magic or were…well, doing some Omelas shit. Conducting some heinous sacrifice of others that explains the power they’ve got. But she wouldn’t do that herself,” I argued. “I mean, she’s so…kind, it’s like her whole modus operandi.”

Izumi needed a moment to parse the borrowed Latin before nodding. “I agree. But I think she is taking advantage of another suffering.”

“Don’t love the sound of that. Also don’t know what you mean,” I admitted. “Since I guess I’m just admitting when I don’t know stuff now.”

“The Blue Spark Incident.”

I frowned, trying to recap what I knew of Lighthouse’s history to fit the two events together in the timeline. About four years ago, they had rescued Amane. This had led to or exacerbated a schism in Hikanome that culminated in Sugawara being deposed. The Blue Spark Incident had come sometime soon after, some necromantic ritual gone wrong which had torn open a scar in Tokyo’s sky and destroyed the hospital that was now Lighthouse Tower in the process. Todai had then renovated it and moved in—I wasn’t sure if the donation of Flame they’d received was before or after that, but it definitely preceded Ai creating Ebi.

That was all well and good, but I didn’t know enough about the incident itself to see the relationship. I told this to Izumi, who explained somberly. “The incident was caused by a Hikanome scientist who was trying to bring back her husband. Scientist is not the right word—researcher? Builder? At any rate, she had been gifted part of Sugawara’s Flame before the schism, and used it in a ritual where she used one of the summer fireworks displays to make the shape of a glyph. At the same time, she killed sixty people. You remember what Sugawara did in the video?”

I did. When Hina had killed him, his corpse had splattered a fountain of gore into a perfect glyph to excise his soul—or a simulacrum of it, depending on if you asked me or Izumi—and transmit himself through the camera of Alice’s mantle to reach us. There was an intersection between blood magic and glyphcraft that was truly powerful, all the precision of intent that came from glyphs married with the ultimate desperation that the Flame seemed to crave. “Christ. That, writ large?”

“Yes.” Izumi’s tone carried an awful gravity. “She wanted to…reconstruct her husband’s soul with that power, after Miyoko could not help her. Instead she made, or called, something, which the Radiances sealed away in the sky above the bay. That part is not important. What is important is that she was attempting to make a soul. Ebi-chan is…a successful version of that, I think.”

She let that sit. I didn’t know what to say; this was beyond my wheelhouse, and my thoughts were beset by the buzzing of flies feasting on the dead. It felt like Izumi was making a leap that landed us squarely at a secret far darker than anything I’d imagined, but I didn’t know how else to explain what I was seeing around me. “I don’t like this speculation,” I decided, looking down at the concrete box beneath me. “Ebi? Care to chime in? Please?”

Izumi sighed. “Not necessarily. I think she used the incident itself afterward. Many more died in the fighting, and I think she…found a way that the suffering would not go to waste. The timing is very close, and I cannot think of another way for what we see here to exist without Ai hurting many, many people.”

“That sounds more like her,” I admitted. “I don’t want to be here anymore. Take me back, please.”

“Can’t really see or hear you out here, y’know. Like what you saw?”

“You’re beautiful,” I replied, and it wasn’t a lie. Regardless of whatever had transpired to create Ebi, I couldn’t deny the beauty I’d seen in the result. Maybe that reflected poorly on me. “And confounding. How did Ai—”

“Bup bup bup,” she interrupted. “Doesn’t matter. Just riddle me this: do I have a soul?”

“Oh. So that was the point of all that?” I spared a glance at Izumi, who crossed her arms in self-satisfaction.

“Yeah,” Ebi confirmed. “So, what do you think?”

“I mean, yeah, of course you do,” I reasoned. “If that’s not a soul, I don’t know what else I’d call it. Are you just saying that it is possible to create something indistinguishable from a soul with enough glyphs, and that’s what we should be pursuing for Izumi?”

“Fuck no. I’m way too much work.”

My ego attempted to challenge that for a moment—surely I was smart enough to wrap my head around the basic architecture that made her tick, and I could replicate the principles given enough time, and once I had it in GWalk, even the most repetitively absurd schematics were just a simple matter of copying and pasting patterns around. That was the fantasy of Ezzen the genius, and it had little bearing on reality. Actual hands-on glyphcraft was not the abstracted universe of a diagram, where adding more glyphs was as simple as a drag-and-drop or muscle-memory sequence of shortcuts. Each would have to be woven individually, by hand, with no economies of scale save for the simple monotony of practiced motions. The only shortcut there was in blood magic.

“Figures. You’re really not gonna confirm or deny…?”

“What, so you can learn enough about it to accidentally spill the secrets on the forums? ‘Oh yeah, just kill a hundred people and you too can have your own artificial intelligence running the show.’ I’m sure the Peacies would love to know that’s all it takes. Oh, wait, no, cause if it were that easy, we would have had Skynet two minutes after the firestorms started.”

I sat back in my chair and shot a glance at Izumi, trying to tell her to follow my lead. I wanted to know more, but Ebi clearly didn’t seem interested in giving us the details, and I had to admit that was probably for the best. “Okay, so we should stop guessing, we get it. I’d love to stop prying, but…if not that, then what was the point of showing us?”

“Showing you was the point,” the slightly irritated voice from beyond replied. “My soul is a thing you can show, a physical thing, sitting out thirty meters kata of here for all to see if you can get out there and don’t get shredded by the brain-to-twizzlers traps.”

“…The what?” I hadn’t seen any traps out there—but I supposed they wouldn’t have been very good traps if I had, would they?

“I’m there,” she continued, pointedly ignoring my question. “You can look at me. Now, point to where Izumi’s soul is.”

Izumi’s arms stayed crossed; mine made it about halfway up before I understood it was a trick question. “In my other body,” she said.

“Is it?” Ebi countered. “If I go down there, pop open the cranium and the ribcage to do an invasive soulectomy, will I find a special wishbone that contains your essence? Your memories, your personality, your morality, all that other shit? Hm? Again, if it were that simple, the Peacies would have done it.”

It was a discouraging thought, the same reasoning we’d taken refuge in regarding time travel now flipped on its head to become a barrier to something we actually wanted to do. I tried to think out loud nonetheless, aware that I was walking in the footsteps of arguments much older than actual magic.

“I mean, it’s probably more emergent than that, isn’t it? As in, there’s a lot of crossover between the body and the brain. We’re animals made of meat, and the meat has far too much input.” I almost spat that part; the comforting disassociation had long faded and I was back to feeling like a sack of fluids. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a soul, right? The Flame has to attach to something, and you can’t weave it while in a mantle. That means the real body has something, or is something, the mantle does or is not,” I reasoned, now almost pleading with reality as claustrophobia closed in around me.

“Philosophically, sure,” Ebi agreed. “But you see the problem. There’s not a clear thing to work magic on and move around.”

“That was the problem with the Blue Spark Incident,” Izumi agreed. “She was trying to retrieve a soul that didn’t exist.” That was probably why she didn’t look as distressed about this epistemological reality as I felt; for her, it was old news, something she’d seen others attempt and fail at already.

And then it hit me. I raised my hand as though I had an objection for the professor, despite having not been in a classroom in five years. “Hold on.”

“Holding,” replied the disembodied voice.

“What about Sugawara? I mean, we all felt him, right? Had something like spiritual contact with him? Felt the malice?”

Now Izumi’s face twisted, immediate understanding soured by the deepest discomfort. She nodded. Ebi had nothing to nod with, but I could have sworn the kitchen countertop’s overhead lights flickered briefly. I took that as my cue to keep going.

“Even if that is just a simulacra of him and the ‘real soul’ or whatever you want to call it is gone, he did still manage to imbue himself into it. Translate his personality, the essence of it, into Flame. Like, died and immediately made a ghost of himself, one that apparently could pilot a body if given the opportunity to do so. That’s what we want, right? And yeah, sure, he did kill his physical body to do that, but that’s kind of a goal for you, right, Izumi?”

The party goth gave another nod. “It is. And he did it with what seemed to be only one glyph. But I don’t think it was that simple. Hikanome, before and after him, do magic with ritual, and he had the worst of his cult with him at the end. I doubt the part we saw was all of it.”

“Yeah, we lost contact right after, didn’t we? And the others came directly back, they didn’t stick around to investigate. Ebi, forgive me for not keeping track—did any of us go back after the fact?”

“Nope.”

“Can we?”

The supercomputer in the walls took several seconds to answer that. Imagined some of her threads darting out into the void from the main rectilinear grid, feelers of infomantic sub-lattices plumbing for information in ways I could conceptualize but not imagine. I realized that that imagery, that of tentacles sent far afield through the dark, bore a striking resemblance with the lights beneath the ice in my dreams—a thought for later. Ebi hummed. “I think so. I like where your head’s at. As far as I can tell, and I can tell quite a lot, the government’s really embarrassed that we got the whole extrajudicial killing thing past them, so they kind of covered it up for us. Helps that we bribed the shit out of the local police there, they were already corrupt as fuck, that’s how he got his goons all together there in the first place.”

“Great. So…we should go look,” I decided. “Go out to that hospital, see if we can piece together how he did it, see if we can do it nice and clean with more glyphcraft. And then…do a little necromancy.”

I was about to prompt Izumi for her thoughts on the matter—her shoulders had gone rather hunched and I suspected this would be a hard sell—when a new voice joined the conversation, one that was very slightly out of breath, as though she’d rushed over as soon as she’d heard but was trying her best to hide it. Or, realistically, rushed over before she’d heard, judging by the Australian accent.

“Hey, did I hear extrajudicial killing? And forensics? Finally, some shit we can actually bond over.” I turned to see Yuuka grinning at me, her eye aglow. “We’ll find something there if we go right now.”

Author’s Note:

4.13 is a doubly unlucky number. Four is an omen of death in Japan, and thirteen is unlucky in the USA. Surely that will have no bearing on the outcome of this excursion to find the remnants of a cult leader’s necromantic ritual! Right? Say it with me now!

Sorry that this chapter has been so delayed! The last couple of weeks have seen my household gain a new pet. I’m trying (and thus far succeeding) to build better writing habits and make the best of the time I have.  Thank you as usual to the beta readers, as well as the patrons and everybody in the Discord; your collective enthusiasm is doing a lot for my work ethic. Anticipate the next chapter on Sunday as usual!

That’s pretty much all for this week. Next chapter should coincide with new art and the story’s 5000 reader (RR+Shub) milestone. See you then!

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March 24, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Mention of rape

Hot water streamed down my face as I scrubbed vigorously with a wet washcloth. It passed over my eyelids and along the contours of my nose, with special attention toward the most oily and sweaty crevices near the corners of my eyes and nostrils. I had to give myself permission to go to town on this towel; I was used to owning just two little rags for this, neither washed frequently enough. The penthouse, by contrast, had an infinite supply of fresh, clean laundry, one of Hina’s self-imposed duties to the women she loved. And me.

I was cleaning off the sweat and filth that had accumulated while I’d dreamt up a meeting with the Vaetna. Sweat had matted my nightclothes to my skin to such a degree of crustiness that it might have actually evoked Vaetna-carapace euphoria if not for the horrible oiliness and the stomach-churning man-stench of my body odor; none of the girls had commented on the latter, but if I’d been able to smell it, then they also certainly would have, and that amplified the physical unpleasantness even further. My suggestion of a pressure washer had been a joke, but only half of one, driven by a very real and urgent need to reset all the biological membranes and fluids and films of my body, inside and out. Now I’d gotten a liter of water in me and several more scoured over my outer layer and my skin didn’t feel like sticky death, and I knew that that was about as well as I’d be able to do without being opened up like Hina and given a physiologically impossible deep cleaning. I imagined being utterly disassembled, down to each individual component, and each given their own thorough deep cleaning. Rust remover and an ultrasonic bath and careful polishing, or whatever equivalents might be possible for those pieces of the human animal I regrettably was.

Short of that, bathing really did help, as they’d said it would, a lesson that I’d always known but had struggled to implement before coming to Todai. My current bout of tourist activity was a far outlier for my lifestyle, after all; before now, spear training had been pretty much my only meaningful exercise, and that was merely gilding on the otherwise disastrous state of my self care. It had been far, far too long since I’d seen a dentist, for example. Hina had me brushing my teeth now, at least, but little things like that had slipped through the cracks for years and years as I’d slowly decayed, escaping into the logical brainspace of GWalk submenus and the companionship of the chatroom instead. I was deeply ashamed in hindsight of how that had simply become the default of my life, unbathed and unshaven and sickly pale. The only times I’d seriously cleaned up were for my annual check-ins with the PCTF-sponsored aid group that paid my disability checks, and even my efforts in that had been slipping as of last year’s. My final one, now that I thought about it. Strange.

But even compared against the worst of all that time, and even with my recent spate of excursions, I had never felt more physically rotten than I had right before getting into the shower. The steam-hazy, fittingly dreamlike inner chamber of my unit bath provided barely enough solace to make it tolerable. It went deeper than the general nastiness that had accumulated on my skin, manifesting outwardly in how I’d been feeling my face and tripping over my tongue while recounting the dream.

Many old sensations were odd. The bridge of my nose, the for-some-reason-not-orange fluff of my eyebrows, these long-familiar—if resented for how they cast my face as masculine—features of my facade felt freshly alien under my hands. I couldn’t stop seeing my nose at the bottom of my vision, and my tongue felt large in my mouth even after rectifying the mild dehydration. It was a small mercy that the warm washcloth glided smoothly along my jaw and neck with no stubble to catch on, but I was still acutely aware of how it was all soft, squishy meat, how my gut was heavy with organs and blood.

My form in the dream had felt far more graceful. Maybe that wasn’t quite the right word; I had felt optimized…for what? For killing, even though I at least consciously still felt guilt for what we had done at Thunder Horse? It must have been the Vaetna’s presence, or at least my expectation of it, that had done that. My subconscious—and possibly also my Flame, insofar as the two were even separate—had wanted to live up to their great violence, even before witnessing the paranatural, divine truth that they were their vaet in the most literal sense. And I must have taken notes from Amethyst in the mix of the mechanical and monstrous, accenting it with Vaetna-flavored white carapace and a distinct sharpness to my shape, exemplified most in the talons.

That all felt like a fairly natural extension of the revolutions in my identity that I’d had since being flametouched a month prior. The rest was more vexing, especially comparing further against Amethyst: the breasts had been conspicuously present, a far more pronounced signifier of femininity than the gemstone mecha’s mere tight waist, and of course I’d practically had a cloak of my nigh-incandescent hair, which was notable because Amane eschewed simulating her beautiful, glossy locks altogether. She had a near-total split between her attractive, delicate and cultured human form and the war machine, whereas I seemed to be blurring those lines in a way that seemed not very Vaetna. Then again, she wasn’t very mahou shoujo, as I understood it—though that understanding was almost as shallow as it got.

Similarly, the talons were an extension of my foot prosthetic, I figured. Maybe the spear-foot, as silly as it had been in concept, had been onto something? I was stripped of the stopgap one right now; it wasn’t rated for the shower. It really had served me well, given that apparently Ai had thrown it together in two days of design. She was supposed to present to me the integrated prototypes soon, with the translator and other tentative features. The burn had been healing up very well, perhaps preternaturally well, and even without the pain-dampening effects I was doing just fine. If you accounted for the fact that I was benefiting from in-house access to state-of-the-art prosthetic technology,  I really had come out the other end of my first real use of blood magic only a little worse for wear. 

So perhaps a little more couldn’t hurt—that thought came from the part of me that was still unmoored from my flesh. I countered with the assertion that I was putting too much stock in a form the back of my brain had cooked up on short notice, influenced by my especially long time in the doll and the impact of Kat’s reappearance just before. That was what I told myself to dissuade any pervading thoughts about performing just a little blood magic, as a treat. I knew that was unreasonable; short of entirely switching into a mantle or the doll, any magical solutions to realign my sense of self with my flesh were deeply, deeply inadvisable.

Inadvisable, but so very tempting. It took over an hour in the shower to soothe my aching soul enough to assure myself that I wasn’t going to take the leap without precautions or medical backup. I needed to be careful, think through which parts of my shape earnestly felt like me, separate the signal from the noise—how did Asuka, the slender anime waifu, fit into this Vaetna-Amethyst fusion and its decidedly more prominent breasts than hers? What was the ideal Ezzen, these days? I resolved to finish my mantle to trial and refine everything, ask Amane for insight on that meat-mantle divide, and of course consult Alice and Hina for their experiences in discarding and reshaping their flesh. Also, maybe they or the others would enjoy showing me some of the classic mahou shoujo anime, or Evangelion, just to clarify that aspect of it all for myself. It also just sounded nice, which I was getting better at admitting to myself.

All of that was necessary preparation, as I saw it. When I crossed that bridge for real, I would know what lay on the other side, and I would do it right.

I should have known that Izumi was going through the same thoughts—only she had access to true escapism, and as such, she’d let the problem fester until it had hit the breaking point last night and she’d passed out. I didn’t actually see her for the rest of that night, having been coaxed directly from my bed to the shower, but Hina popped in a few minutes before I was done to give an update—directly into the stream of water and naked, which raised some fascinating questions about how exactly she had been caring for her assassin-with-benefits.

Like me, the dual-bodied partygirl was suffering from acute dysmorphia, which she both treated and intensified by using her mantle continuously until it crashed like a computer gone too long without a restart. Unlike me, hers was exacerbated by truly terrible self-care habits ever since we’d driven away Sugawara’s specter, even worse than my own. She had gone to considerable lengths to ignore her original body’s existence, neglecting its well-being entirely in the process. Apparently that body had barely moved in weeks and was simply not getting enough nutrition.

That felt like my fault. I’d failed to follow through on my promise of upgrading her simulated taste buds; it was one of those earnest “let me help you with that” sentiments that fell through the cracks, voluntary responsibility that faded from memory in the span of one night. And the consequences were dire: outside of when we’d shared meals on the town, she’d apparently been subsisting on one or two nearly-pure-sugar convenience store treats a day and nothing else. The Kimura body was woefully vitamin deficient, gaunt and pallid and atrophied. The final form of the room-rotting I’d inflicted upon myself for years, amplified by a level of escapism available only to a flamebearer.

It was untenable. She was alive and stable thanks to an IV drip in the medical wing on the eighteenth floor, but that was a band-aid solution. Hina reported that she’d woken up, rebooted her mantle, and ditched the flesh again as quickly as she could.

The next morning, I forced myself out of bed with the intent of helping her fix her sense of taste as a first step toward at least keeping her body self-sufficient—alone, as I’d slept nearly sixteen hours and the Radiances were long gone. I spent a few minutes checking my phone, finding that I had two hundred chatroom pings—scrambling for the news informed me that in response to the PCTF’s proclamation of intent to kick the sandcastle, the Vaetna had made a big jenga tower of every nuclear submarine in the North Atlantic. The rest was all just fallout from the stream. My friends wanted to know what it was like having a Flame from the future.

The short answer, which I didn’t have the energy to communicate, was that it mostly consisted of loathing the fact that my bones were inside me. I eventually broke the spell by managing to roll over and move my joints enough for my personhood gauge to improve from “mineral tree with meat leaves and cursed with consciousness” to “tired guy,” which advanced to “tired enby shellcreature” after convincing myself that brushing my hair and putting on a hoodie and mask would help. That was enough to get my self-actualization to turn over and my motivation came rumbling to life, and I {AFFIX}ed my prosthetic and went to see the state of Izumi’s body for myself.

Instead, as I walked toward the penthouse’s upper elevator doors and peered over the railing, I saw her actual body—that is, the mantle—sitting at one of the high chairs bordering the gargantuan kitchen island, doomscrolling some social media or another, and generally looking like a million bucks as usual, which I now understood to be on loan from her main body’s health. She waved me down, and wasted no time once I came into earshot.

“Help me get rid of it.”

“Your…body,” I replied pointlessly while navigating the last few steps.

“Yes. I can’t go back to it. I’ve been thinking that I could do what Takehara-san did, and change its shape, turning it into this form instead,” she gestured at her own figure, “or we could simply find a way to move my mind and Flame into this mantle permanently and get rid of the biological body completely. Your thoughts?”

I had a sinking feeling that she would brook no half-measures. “My thoughts are that those are both…really risky, with the Peacies breathing down our necks. You don’t really care about that, do you?”

“Our fox told me you would help me.” There was an edge of nervousness in her voice. “Because you understand what it’s like. Everything becomes suddenly wrong. I don’t want to be that. I don’t want to be him.”

I took a deep breath, looked at her with all the empathy I could muster. “I’m helping you no matter what, yeah. There’s all the, y’know, consequences, politics, all that stuff, whether we or Hikanome need the public figure of Kimura to stick around. But that’s not my wheelhouse—all I’m really good at is magic. That’s what they pay me for,” I managed to joke. They didn’t pay me so much as give me unlimited access to company funds, and I’d hardly even done anything resembling work. “And I will help you with magic, to the fullest extent I know how. Just…can we take a step back from sanguimantic options for a second? And can I sit down?”

She directed a pointed look at my corona of orange hair, freshly brushed over my shoulders. Then she nodded toward one of the seats next to her, extending a delicate shin to shove it out a bit so I could gingerly hop up.

I sighed. “Okay, yeah, I’ve gotten off pretty light when it comes to sanguimancy. My Flame seems to like it when I do st—desperate things to my body. I don’t know if yours is the same. Alice is evidence that transition by incredible gore is a thing the Flame will permit, but that’s…derived from believing really hard in mahou shoujo? Is that the mechanism?” That didn’t sound right, but I didn’t know enough to dispute it. “Do magical girls transform by horrific blood explosion in the shows?”

“…Have you seen a magical girl anime?” She looked vexed. “You’ve been here for a month, living with them, and they haven’t shown you Precure?” She pronounced it in Japanese. “Or, with how this new magic is so…murderous, at least Madoka?”

“No. I mean, I know, um, ‘goretastic’—Hina’s words, not mine—transformations aren’t the norm, it’s usually all sparkles, but since Alice seems to really be into the whole look, I kind of assumed there was some kernel of truth there? Or, if not a kernel, at least, like, something obvious to reference.”

“No, it’s not how it usually works,” she confirmed. “Not the classic ones she loves, at least. She knows that her mahou shoujo-pposa, the one she shows to the world and makes the others live, is fake. Or, not fake,” she corrected guiltily. “Real, because she believes in it, but the Light does not believe in love and purity. It is fire and blood, and I don’t know if it would be as kind to me as it would to her. She is young, and I am…old, Ezzen.” Izumi, gorgeous and trendy twenty-something, looked tired. “That matters to whatever I will do to get rid of that body. Most flamebearers are much younger than me. The Flame wants potential, it wants change, and when I am in that body I feel like I have neither.”

I had no emotional frame of reference for that. I’d decayed my way through my teens, procrastinating life itself, justifying it with the back-burner knowledge that I had plenty of time, that when I finally got off my ass and did something with my life it would be when I still had several good decades ahead of me. I’d still felt like I had infinite potential.

“You’re not that old,” was the first thing that came out of my mouth. That was my earnest reaction, recollected from when we’d spoken at the barbecue. Kimura had come off as stately, not elderly or doddering, and had looked legitimately good for somebody over fifty at the time. If she was even over fifty—I realized I wasn’t sure. It was very difficult to have a conversation about identity when you knew so little about the other person. I resisted the urge to pull out my phone to raid Wikipedia, and instead, the second thing I said was more thought out and empathetic. “Okay, um, let me rephrase that. Why do you feel like you’re old? What was your life like before you were a flamebearer? Uh—I don’t know if there’s a delicate way to ask, so: were you trans before the age of magic? Sorry, I’m realizing those aren’t actually the same question.”

Izumi gave this a long moment’s consideration, staring at her pale and perfect hands. When she spoke, there was regret in her voice. “Transgender and transsexual and those were not concepts that I knew when I was young. In Japan, it’s only a thing people learned about recently. Looking back…yes, I think I was, but I didn’t have a word for it. In high school and college I was a crossdresser, an otokonoko. I wanted to be a girl, but didn’t have…permission? I was a coward. I felt like I would have to throw away my whole life for it to be real, and in the 2000s, when I turned thirty, I just…stopped trying.”

“Until the Flame,” I prompted.

“Until the Flame,” she agreed. “Hi kara no megumi. A blessing from fire—the original kanji was hi as in fire, now it’s hi as in the sun,” she explained. “Branding. For us, for me and Hongo-kun and Miyoko-chan and him, we were suddenly able to do new things, to be new things. And I was a coward, again. Izumi came back to life, but she was secret. I was still Kimura. Still a coward. And then…and then…” she winced and physically recoiled from something only she could see.

I knew what she couldn’t say. Sugawara had essentially blackmailed her with her second identity, pressganged her into his service, and then driven those barbs of control deeper and deeper through magic. It occurred to me that his ability to pillage her dreams had been a twisted evolution of the same phenomenon that allowed me to speak with Holton and the Vaetna. She’d never spoken about the full extent of his control over her, how far it had extended beyond that in magical terms, but knowing what had happened to Yuuka let me fill in the most grievous violations for myself. Izumi’s body and soul had been defiled and desecrated.

No wonder she wanted to part ways utterly with that part of her life. To Izumi, the Kimura body represented failure to self-actualize and memorialized such comprehensive abuse—I kicked myself for ever suspecting that she’d betray us. Amethyst had been right about that; we’d made a ride-or-die ally that night when we’d torched Sugawara and incinerated his magical hold over her.

“Getting rid of that body is the only way you’ll feel truly free from him,” I surmised. “Fuck me, that’s dark, sorry. And presumptuous.”

“It’s correct.”

That immediately brought up a new question. Somebody as violated and as capable as Izumi ought to have been digging two graves and then embarking on an epic quest of vengeance, not partying. “Wait, then if he’s the root cause of all this, why haven’t we gone and found him? Finished the job? He’s still out there, isn’t he? We laid those traps, but…”

“He is already dead.”

“In the sense that he doesn’t have a heartbeat? Yeah, I guess. But like, that was definitely an evil ghost we fought. Are you saying that the thing that escaped from us really isn’t him anymore, magically speaking?”

“I am saying that I wanted him gone, and now he is. Sugawara, the Savior, the founder of Hikanome, the man who raped me and a thousand others, he is dead. That ghost cannot lead any more monsters, and he is not inside me anymore. To me, that means he is dead. What is left is an echo. It has to be. He cannot survive that as himself, it wouldn’t be—fair,” she sighed, slumping forward to rest her forehead on the countertop. “It would not be fair. So he is dead. Does that make me a coward still?”

“Oh,” I whispered, a heavy sadness lodging itself in my chest. I wasn’t going to point out how her reasoning was very motivated, how the thing that was out there could probably still inflict evil regardless of whether or not it was Sugawara in a philosophical sense—she clearly already knew all that. I only answered the direct question, as honestly as I could. “Maybe? You’d rather destroy your past self than destroy him—or your present self, rather, because even if it’s not your body, it’s still the body keeping you alive,” I reminded her. Then I hesitated. “Can I pose a question?”

Still face-down, she motioned for me to go ahead.

I took a deep breath. “…Do you want to be done with all this flamebearer stuff?” For myself, such a notion was absurd, but Izumi’s path was different from mine. “Like, let’s say you do destroy your old body and assume this form permanently. Given the choice, would you rather abandon all VNT activities, or even your Flame completely, somehow? A clean break that lets you abdicate responsibility for Japan’s future and so on?”

That made her sit back up. “No.”

“Quick answer.” And the one I had been expecting.

She leaned back in her chair and stared across the kitchen at nothing in particular. “I thought about it every night he was in my head. Leaving all of this, starting over as a normal, young girl. And perhaps, if we had killed him the first time, four years ago, I might have done that. But—we did not, and I remained his pawn, both from magic and because…I am dutiful,” she sighed. “To Hikanome’s leaders and its people. With him gone I now feel like I can leave that behind. But to Japan, as the PCTF prepare to eat us? To you and those beautiful ones who are going to show them that we are the bitterest poison? I am loyal to that. I won’t leave. I will party like there’s no tomorrow, because I have lost too much of my youth already, but when Toudai goes to war, I will be there with you.”

“Not a coward, then. Simple as.” I felt very clever.

Izumi’s head swiveled, owl-like, to face me. “Oh. Yes, well, ah, when you put it that way—”

“But also, it’s not cowardice to, like, chill out and party for a while, right? I mean, you’ve been through the fucking wringer in a way that blows all my shit completely out of the water. You were pretty much trying to convince me of that a few days ago. I think it’d only be cowardice to avoid dealing with whatever remains of Sugawara if he was actually out there hurting people right now, which he’s not…as far as I’m aware. I don’t keep up with Japanese news—area of growth for me, under the circumstances—but I think I’d still have heard about hauntings or more random ripple stuff via the Radiances, if it was happening.”

Izumi blinked. “You’re very eloquent when you try, Ezzen.”

That shut me down hard. I physically recoiled into my hoodie a bit. “Um, uh. No. What? Back on topic. We started this convo with you asking me to help annihilate your body downstairs. Whatever happens with Sugawara, I intend to help you do that much. So, enough philosophizing about death and cowardice,” I declared. “There’s a lot of questions about the mechanism that would take time to research. I assume you’ve done some of your own already? You laid out those two paths, metamorphosis or transmigration, if I wanted to give them fancy names.”

“I have ideas for both. No diagrams.”

“Because sanguimancy?”

“…Maybe. What did Brianna tell you? ‘Magic is more than glyphs?’ She is right, and I have some ideas.”

“…Okay…” I wasn’t sure where this was going. “Alice is qualified to tell us about the metamorphosis version, or at least as qualified as we’re going to find, I imagine. I think Sky did something similar. But, uh, the transmigration version, fully pulling your soul and Flame out of your body…the only thing that’s coming to mind would be what Sugawara did to himself, and we just established that you consider that, like, actual death, no continuity of identity or whatever people call it. It’s fundamentally different from using a mantle, so I don’t think the Radiances would be much help.” I blinked. “Oops, you said you had ideas.”

She grinned thinly. “And now I don’t need to say them.” As I half-performatively reeled from that, she rapped her fingernails along the countertop. “We will have to speak to Miyoko. She knows souls and death better than anyone else in Japan.”

That sobered me immediately. “Oh. Right. My dad.”

“Yes. I believe we’ve put that off as long as we can—the meeting of Japan’s flamebearers, my trial, it must happen soon.”

“How soon?”

“I don’t know.”

“That…sucks!” I decided. “I’m going to sound like an idiot now: could this meeting be an email instead? Like, with proper infomantic encryption, all that good stuff?”

Izumi hesitated for a long moment, genuinely caught off guard. I had the sense that much of the interaction between Japan’s VNTs was steeped in ritual—but none of those rituals could be more than seven years old, when you thought about it. They were hand-me-downs from culture, fictional expectations about being Important Magical People that were much older than any of their organizations or magic itself. And those didn’t have to actually reflect reality, did they? I would never begrudge Alice her mahou shoujo when it came to her guiding principles in life, but for actually getting stuff done, surely we could do better.

“Not the whole meeting,” Izumi eventually said. “But for my body, yes.”

And just like that, she sent the email. It took about five minutes, flurries of typing separated by long spans of sitting and thinking, then deleting. When she put down her phone, she looked a little sick. “I am still a coward. I sent that as Kimura.”

“She doesn’t know? Wait, what does she think you—either of your ‘you’s—have been up to since the barbecue?”

“…We’ll find out.”

“Actually, you won’t,” came a new voice from overhead. Ebi’s, from the speakers. “First of all, that email was not encrypted enough, so be grateful I sniped it. And I don’t feel like letting you debase yourself like that, Izumi, come on. But more importantly, if you want to ask about souls without bodies, I’m right here.”

Author’s Note:

Sometimes you really do just have to let the characters talk to each other until change happens. Ez and Izumi are two peas in a pod; it’s really no wonder Hina’s into both of them. And boy oh boy, Ebi sure is coming out swinging. Did you miss her? I missed her!

Apologies again for the delayed chapter. I was sick! And then executive dysfunction (and Deep Rock Galactic) got its wretched claws into me. I think the next chapter of Sunspot will skip this Sunday and instead go up the following Sunday, March 23, so I can give myself the time I need to write ahead a little bit. Thank you for your patience, it means the world to me.

Thank you also to the beta readers who helped me navigate what this chapter should be doing. They also helped me refine the next commission — if all goes well, I should be able to release it on the update after we hit 5000 followers between RR and Shub! It’s Amethyst and Heliotrope. I’m very excited.

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March 13, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

Mild dysmorphia

Hina pouted. “So no stabbies?”

“Out of the gutter, kemono,” Yuuka sighed without any real bite. After I’d finished my recap, she had seen fit to drop out of her mantle, from skirt and frills back to frumpy hoodie and shorts. “What I’m hearing—and seeing, though who knows if that means anything anymore—is that we’re on our own. As usual.”

Amethyst chirped a reply above her, looming as the team’s centerpiece as they gathered around my bed. I was sat propped up against a pillow that cushioned my back from the headboard. Hina was the only one on the bed properly with me, lying at the other end and kicking her legs up in a distracting rhythm of soft pwuf thumps as her heels fell back to the bedspread. She’d been very good when I’d stumbled into my room and declared I was going back to sleep for something extremely important, but I guessed that sometime during my dream-meeting she’d been informed that I was heading off the threat of imminent Vaetna combat, because when I’d woken she’d been a bit grumpy. Understimulated, maybe.

“We are enough.”

Nobody contested Izumi’s use of “we.” She stood a bit off from the proper Radiances, also ready for war by definition of what she was. Not a Radiance in any official capacity, and in fact I wasn’t sure what the public status of Izumi the assassin or Kimura the major cult leader was supposed to be, but at least at an unofficial level she’d naturally slipped into being the team’s sixth magical girl. Or seventh, or eighth, depending on how you counted myself and Ebi—the point was that, as a mantle wielder who shared their collective loathing for the great machine to which Sugawara had fed Amane, she was welcome to hear what I had conveyed about the Vaetna and join in on the conversation. She’d swapped her look from the party girl outfit to the dark assassin, hair bound up in a long ponytail. Her eyes glinted with readiness as she looked out the window of my room, watching for what was coming; less gleeful and anticipatory than Hina, but prepared to act in the same vein.

The other Radiances stood at my side, mantled up like they were ready for war, unwilling to entirely take Yuuka’s cue to stand down despite her precognition. Like Izumi, they were in their low-profile forms, the shapes they’d used to take out Sugawara’s hospital-turned-compound. Their signature bright colors and shapes had given way to muted tones and more uniform silhouettes, geometry and flair simplified to fit more complex lattices; all the cosmetic visual and sound effects had been tossed in favor of a suite of infomantic countermeasures and better maneuverability. They were still more garnished than Izumi’s mundane murder outfit, unwilling to wholly forgo the skirts and sleeves and hairstyles that said “Radiance,” but many of the contours that remained were stealthily practical, there to improve radar invisibility or acting as resonance structures in the LM that made it more resilient.

When I’d first paged through the diagrams for these configurations of the mantles, I’d experienced some envy about the cleverness on display, the interdisciplinary engineering and real experience that went into those features. Right now I was mostly just grateful to have that on my side. Was Izumi right that it was enough?

Radiance Opal leaned against her crystalline girlfriend’s thigh, thinking deeply, not answering immediately. Ai was mantled as well, the first time I’d seen this variation of hers; it was relatively straightforward, mostly distinguished from her teammates by green accents, a less-frilly skirt, and a much longer ponytail than her usual, almost a match for Izumi’s except for the tiny bit of cosmetic flair in how it flowed gently from a nonexistent breeze. “On our own,” she agreed. “So what does ‘enough’ mean? Enough for what?”

“It means we fight!” Hina asserted, punctuating it with another leg thump. It was adorable, but belied frustration. “If the Vaetna don’t want to do stabbies, fine. I’m not mad, just disappointed. But I still think the Peacies can’t really say no to a fight. We could just go and do what we did to Sugawara, kill ‘em quick. We can.”

She’d already tried to exit my room via the balcony to do just that less than two minutes into my explanation of what the Vaetna had shared. And then again two minutes later. She’d only agreed to stop when Ai had gently suggested she busy herself getting me some more water and towels; it turned out that my body had been working hard, perspiring through the clothes I’d thrown on to sleep most comfortably as quickly as possible. I’d been parched and needed to stop to sip water every few words, and even now that I was somewhat rehydrated, my tongue still didn’t quite sit in my mouth right.

“We can, in theory,” Alice allowed, “but kill who is the question, and not one I think we should be answering tonight. They’re not going to move tonight for sure—” she looked meaningfully toward Yuuka at that, who nodded confidently, “—and I would really love to get some sleep and actually plan.”

“No—hmgh,” I cleared my throat, “no qualms about the murder?”

Normally I would have qualified the question a bit more, with an acknowledgment that I’d already seen their willingness to spill Peacie blood and this was mostly just to confirm whether they were still willing to do that on their home turf. But my throat didn’t feel up to the challenge, and besides, the nuance got through regardless.

“Yes. Well, I’ve got a spot of worry about the logistics, but mahou shoujo defend Japan, when it’s called for. And at this point it is called for, I’m not seeing any other way out of this, as it sounds like you’d be turned away from the Gate if you wanted to run off to the Spire.”

Hina sat up, indignant on my behalf. “Ally, you don’t seriously think—”

“I might,” I interrupted, rubbing my face. Everything felt a bit off; I found my nostrils objectionable. “Given the choice. If it meant bringing you all out of the line of fire.”

Hina pounced over onto me in a hug. “Mmn. Don’t do that. We like you here.”

“Does Japan?” I asked, raising my hand to indicate I’d continue after I took a sip of water. “I mean, civilians, yeah? Or the government? Just seems to me that Sky—um, Jason, to you guys, probably—put the whole country in a bind by bringing me here. If I wasn’t…” I trailed off, shaking my head, unsure of how to express what I was feeling. I’d had a nice few weeks of being coaxed out of feeling like a burden to the team, but I’d always held onto the subconscious safety net of being able to flee to the Spire if things got too hot for the Radiances, which would hopefully ameliorate the brewing conflict. With that out of the picture, dread and guilt were settling in. “It’s bad,” I tried.

“It has always been bad,” Izumi countered.

Amethyst warbled a sharp noise, heavily filtered Japanese that sounded like agreement. Alice looked up at her, listening, then translated for me. “If you weren’t here, we’d still have eventually had this showdown. The Peacies hate what we represent—the Vaetna said so themselves, if I’m understanding you correctly. We’re not under their thumb, and for that, they would have tried to destroy us as soon as it became convenient for them. Instead, they’re feeling the pressure to do it fast. Not tonight fast,” she repeated, eyeing Yuuka again, maybe trying to prompt her eye to repudiate the claim. When it didn’t, she patted Amethyst’s crystalline thigh. “But faster than they’d like, and you being someone they want to have rather than acceptable losses complicates any of their more violent first strike options.”

“What she’s saying is that with you here, we’ve got the juiciest of all bait,” Yuuka added with a grin. Gone was much of her trepidation and anxiety; it had apparently been something of a literal blockage on her foresight, and with Kat’s stream now past and the all-consuming the Vaetna will kill us premonition managed, it had visibly dissipated from her eye. At a less magical but maybe more significant level, when I relayed what Bri had theorized about the limitations of time travel, she had also brightened; she didn’t like the Vaetna, but after a few probing questions about Bri’s exact wording she seemed to buy it and was cautiously optimistic that we weren’t about to be retroactively wiped from existence by a cascade of time traveling assassins. “I told them about the mantle swap idea,” she informed the others. I felt a little woozy at the prospect of borrowing—really copying—one of the girls’ mantles for the switcheroo ambush plan she had outlined. “We’ll have a window soon, once the fuckers actually offer to negotiate. Couple days of swing on that. Ezza, if you can do your torch thing, I can probably get something exact now.”

I remembered what Bri had said about the connection between silver and white ripple. A bit of determination sparked within me and I obligingly raised my arm, but Hina pushed it back down, locking eyes meaningfully with Alice. The team’s leader shifted.

“We can discuss how to handle that in the morning,” Alice said delicately. “If you want to do a flyby, Yuuka, I trust you. But I think Ezzen has spent all they can, or should, tonight. Is something the matter with your face?” she asked me.

“No. Maybe.” I rubbed my cheekbones. “I wasn’t me in there. In the dream. Or I’m not me out here.”

That provoked more than a little alarm in Alice’s sunset-glow eyes. She muttered something up at Amethyst, who nodded her massive purple head. Ai came over to my side and searched my face with concern. “Do you feel dizzy?”

“No, just sort of…heavy?”

“Ah, fuck,” Yuuka groaned. “Yeah, not gonna ask more from you tonight, you’re cooked. This is what I was talking about, that feeling that stuff doesn’t click between your mantle and your body. I’m a bit surprised it didn’t go off when I was coaching your selfie game, but makes sense that it didn’t happen until you crashed. Sleep’s weird for Flame-brain stuff.”

I saw Alice mouth “selfie game?” at her, but not say it out loud. Hina had no such tact.

“Selfie?”

“Um, took photos in the doll,” I admitted, feeling awfully dysphoric all of a sudden. “Wasn’t much, just wanted to show my friends. Nothing that’s not already public.” I’d only sent one of the more normal, non-silly ones while we’d been getting set up to watch the stream—I was suddenly possessed of the urge to send the others, to declare that that was closer to the real me, or the me that I ought to be, or something along those lines.

Hina was good at reading me. “Would looking at them make you feel better?”

It was a good thought, and I hesitated for a moment, then shook my head. “Um—after we figure out the gameplan.”

Alice gave me a look. Peeved but hiding it well, I thought. “We just got dragged out of bed to fight for our lives, Ezzen, this isn’t a proper strategy meeting. If the coast is clear of the Vaetna, I’m of a mind to go back to bed. The gameplan for tonight is nothing.”

“But shouldn’t it be something?” I asked, grasping for the weight I’d heard in Sani’s words to anchor myself. I’d been issued a mission: send the Peacies a message. “You said they don’t like to rush. We should force them to react, yeah? I mean, it’s not like I would have been the one to go out anyway, so how I’m doing doesn’t really matter, does it? Am I missing something?” I looked between the women. “I mean, what do we gain by waiting?”

“The chance for them to come to the table to negotiate. As a pretense to shoot them under it. If we’re openly hostile, we lose that chance.” Alice’s tone was matter-of-fact, like this was routine. “And there’s more to it than the violence. The Peacies want to get the government on their side, if not the public, so we want to be maintaining business as usual as far as the public is concerned. If we go and hit something right now, say, the USS Abraham Lincoln that’s been hanging out off Fukuoka since a couple days after you showed up, then Hina, Amane, and I aren’t going to get any sleep before our interviews and ad reads tomorrow. We used to do unplanned all-nighters for this stuff back before we were official, but we just can’t afford it now.”

Right then she seemed a far cry from smiles and sparkles, but in fairness, she did have a point; it was an hour when nobody with a day job should have been up. These magical girls traded on their image, and sleep was a critical part of that. I’d had a background awareness that when the girls weren’t in the penthouse, they were doing brand deals and TV appearances and voice acting and all those other things, a black box in my mind labeled “celebrity stuff” that I had considered secondary to their more proper VNT activities like Ai’s magitech R&D and their collective penchant for extrajudicial murder.

Because of my isolation from their cultural presence, it had basically been my assumption that all that soft power paled in comparison to the hard power. They were each more dangerous than a nuclear weapon; that public opinion or the government couldn’t really stop them even if the Peacies did win them over. The Barbecue Inferno had demonstrated that flamebearer conflicts were always a hair’s breadth from turning explosive, and it seemed obvious that this conflict with the largest magitech institution in the world would be decided by the sword no matter what. It was a chilling thought, but it had seemed to me the reality of the situation.

Then I thought of Bri, how she resented being a dagger so much that she had taken on the mantle of a needle instead. And I remembered how I had mourned the way the executioner’s sword reduced all to merely the action of a cutting edge. Even the Vaetna—especially the Vaetna—understood that discarding all notions of influence and negotiation because you had the power of nightmarish butchery was a tragedy, one that ought to be the last resort. Unlike many VNT groups, Lighthouse had the privilege of choosing when to take that step. Yuuka might have been the most literal in how she used her body to curry public favor—albeit a somewhat unpleasant version of it—but all of them had political leverage that correlated directly with physical self-care.

“Okay,” I capitulated. “Not tonight. I get it.”

“I mean, I don’t have to sleep,” Hina pointed out, sitting up with a bounce. I should have seen that coming; she was still activated, and having been denied the promise of a good scrap with the most lethal beings on Earth, she was almost salivating at the idea of another outlet, a coiled spring of anticipated violence. “Yuu-chan, wanna go out? Drink some blood? Have a little fun?”

For a very brief moment, but one long enough for all of us to see it, Yuuka looked sorely tempted. Then she mastered her expression and executed a flawlessly haughty twintail flick. “I have classes tomorrow, kemono.”

Hina blinked her big blue eyes. “Oh, so you’ll bomb a pipeline over lunch, but you won’t hang out with me? Even if we fuck after?”

“Yamete,” Ai cut in before Yuuka could snipe back. “You do have to sleep.” She winced. “That sounds bad when I say it.”

“You can stay with me,” I told Hina. With my initial urge to get out there and take action subsiding, the ennui and body-wrongness were coming to the forefront again. I rubbed my face. “Could use some…company? Dunno.”

Hina gave me a concerned look. She murmured. “You look bad.”

“…Thanks.”

“No, not like that, you’re always a cutie. I mean, um…the displacement thing Yuuka said.”

“Yeah, Ezza, you look like shit. Doll won’t help, don’t get any stupid ideas.”

“I don’t think this is because of the doll,” I confessed.

I’d actually omitted sharing the shape I’d experienced in the dreamscape, the thing with the cloak of bright hair and ice-scraping talons and no gut of organs. I’d been focused on relaying the meeting with the Vaetna and reassuring the girls that the threats facing us weren’t going to come from the Spire or the magically-stapled-back-on-itself future. As long as I didn’t think about that form, being back in this one didn’t bother me as much. But now I was thinking about it, and it sucked. I was wet and dry at once, squishy in many pointless places, and all the protrusions of my face felt wrong. I felt like a screw that had gone in at an angle and could now go no deeper without cracking itself or its housing. Of course, with an actual screw, you could back it out and start again. I wondered if I could do that here, and felt my Flame gather in my chest—

Hina was clever enough, changed enough, and in tune enough with my Flame to pick up on my moment of weakness. She touched my chest to bring me back to reality before I could do something exceedingly stupid. Her voice was soft. “What did you look like?”

“I—should I answer that?” I cautiously asked Ai, no longer trusting my own judgment. “Will that make whatever this is worse?”

“I wanna know,” Hina said. The glimmer in her eyes, that predatory fervor, had now morphed into a hunger for me, or perhaps a hunger on my behalf. It might have been more fair to call them the same thing.

Ai bit her lip. Amethyst crouched down beside her, still almost as tall as she was, and answered for her in slow, crystal-tone English.

“If you say it, it will hurt less,” She added something else in Japanese, directed at Ai, which sounded much more detailed, like two doctors huddled over a patient presenting a new symptom.

Ai sighed. “I don’t recommend listening to our cyborg’s opinions about pain, but she’s right about the other part. You’re desynchronized, and there’s not really a treatment we’ve found. It gets worse the more your mantle diverges from your regular body, so…” she gestured up at Amethyst. “If it was like this…you don’t have to tell us. Whatever you want to share.”

“Ah. Okay,” I managed, now feeling quite bad indeed. My tongue was a dried slug; I drank some water and was all too aware of how it sloshed down my flesh-pipes. “I…yeah. Not quite that much, but…to put words to it. Okay. Doll-Vaetna-sharp.”

I felt very brave for even saying that much. The girls were sympathetic, of course; Alice gave me a gentle smile and Ai nodded in a way that told me she was logging that information to pick at it later. Hina nuzzled my neck, which helped most of all. “Sounds like you, cutie. Can I help?”

With the ice broken—reference to my dream not intended—I felt a little better talking about it. “Doll’s not the word. I was talking about this with Yuuka earlier. Chassis? Just—structural, not fleshy.”

“Other than boobs,” Yuuka guessed. She sounded sympathetic.

“…Yeah. Boobs club.”

“Boobs club.”

“What?” Alice asked, looking between us in confusion.

“Boobs club,” the amethyst mecha offered from above her.

Radiance Opal stared up at her girlfriend, then sighed in defeat, waving a hand at Yuuka. “You know what, sure, whatever. Boobs club. If it means you two are getting along again, I’ll take it, it’s too bloody late for me to parse this. Is talking helping?”

I thought about it. “Sort of. I feel like if you could open me up and hose me down with a pressure washer, that might fix me.”

“Cut…you…open…” Hina mimed writing on an imaginary notepad. “Oh, whaddaya know, I already had that in my calendar for—”

“Stop,” Ai commanded. “You do not want to do anything that changes your body right now. You could lose motor function from the mismatch, or forget how to breathe, or one of many other bad things Amane can tell you about if she wants.”

I sighed, nervously kneading my plated right hand, one of the only parts of me that felt properly alright. “So just…tough it out? This isn’t like, um, gender stuff, that’s all kind of like static in my head, this is…I’m feeling it.”

“This is going to sound kind of insufficient,” Alice warned, “But bathing helps, it really does. Obviously, er, not the pressure washer thing, I can’t recommend that, Hina. But rinse yourself down, use the nice conditioner, wash down your face, feel out where everything is again.”

Amane warbled something else, which drew a scandalized glance upward from her girlfriend. “Sonnano—Fine.” She looked at me, reddening with a blush. “Amane wants me to add that sex can help too. Gets you very, ah, aware of your body, as it were. This feels like a bad recommendation with you two in particular, so let me repeat: Hina, do not cut them open. Honestly, Ezzen, why’d you have to go and put that specific wording in her head?”

“I’m the one suffering here,” I retorted with my gummy lip-flaps and vibrating membranes. “Besides, s’not like I’m the main subject of all that, if she really needs to let off steam, we agreed she can go to—wait.” My heart thudded in my chest. “Where is Izumi?”

“Outta here!” Hina laughed. “She doesn’t have anywhere to be tomorrow. Left when we were talking about waiting.”

Alice joined me in looking around the room in confusion, as surprised as I was that the assassin had vanished. The door and window were both shut. She’d dipped out via the fourth dimension.

“Off toward—-negotiation? Mantle technology?” Yuuka relayed, her eye flaring as worry rose in her voice. “But I can’t see anything else. Fuck. What if she’s selling us out?”

Amane replied quickly and sharply with a reprimand so clear I didn’t need to speak Japanese to get the gist. Hina effectively translated anyway as she crossed her arms. “Yeah, why would she? Too paranoid, Yuu-chan, save it for the bad guys.”

“Did—oh God,” I realized, anxious suspicion spiking as pieces clicked into place. It made too much sense; our hasty forgiveness and acceptance of her would have been the perfect window into understanding the weaknesses of the mantles. Information the Peacies would pay a fortune for. Leverage. “Gathering intel on us the whole time.”

Hina looked genuinely offended. “No, cutie! She hates Sugawara waaaay too much for that. She’s just out and about to scout…prolly.” The tiniest bit of uncertainty crept into her voice at the end; she was unable to find a good rebuttal for what Yuuka had foretold, and was visibly becoming distressed as we were at the sudden possibility that we’d been played for sympathy. “There’s no way she’s a double agent or any shit like that. We helped her with that. You helped her with that!”

Amethyst gave a rumbling reply I couldn’t tonally parse, a much heavier, more scraping sound than the usual tinkle of gemstone. Ai did me the service of translating. “Amane agrees, there’s no way. She fought Sugawara with everything she had when he came here.”

“Everything,” Amethyst added in rock-tumbler English.

Alice’s lashing tail indicated she wasn’t convinced. We all turned to the team’s leader as she thought it out. “…Suppose it is true. Where’d she be going right now? Off to trade that information to the Peacies in exchange for keeping Hikanome or Japan as a whole out of this. Sell us out.” She sounded vexed. “No, that can’t be it. The dark redeemed villain girl doesn’t betray the team after joining up. I don’t think they could actually offer her anything she wants more than she wants to turn them to pulp. Is Japan worth that much to her, after how it’s treated her?” She let the question hang as she looked out the window at Tokyo’s late-night skyline, then made up her mind, her voice taking on an air of urgent command as she faced me again. “We can’t take the risk. Ezzen, I’m sorry, but if you can muster the energy to boost Yuuka’s eye, now is the time, at least enough to verify what she’s doing. Amane, hasshadai e, be ready for an intercept if we have to. Hina, you have her phone number, right? She’s not on the mantle comms, but if you can at least contact her and figure out—”

I tuned out the details of Amethyst’s burst of speed toward my door and Hina scrambling for her phone to focus on dredging up my Flame once more, now motivated by panic rather than dysmorphic wrongness. Fire ignited from the cracks between the plates on my right arm. It was cold as ice; my shell here was incomplete. I tried to shake off that thought with a joke as I held it up toward Yuuka. “Here. Little bit of the future for you?”

“…Damn, you look miserable,” she muttered, then focused on the Flame I had offered. She gasped at the same time as Hina whined at her phone. “Damn, she looks miserable. False alarm!” she called to the others. “Not betrayal, she’s still in the penthouse. Ebi, get out here and help her.”

“What happened?” I asked.

Hina hopped off the bed. “I’m going. I’ll be back when you’re showered, cutie.”

She disappeared with a wet zipping noise while Alice put her face in her hands. Yuuka sighed, waving for me to extinguish my Flame. “Same shit you’re going through, plus a whole lot of neglect. She hasn’t been taking care of her real body at all. Gonna need an IV drip and a real talking-to. And here we thought she’d betrayed us, fuck’s sake. She wasn’t going anywhere, that was a quiet mantle crash.” She looked over at Alice. “Definitely a staying-in night if it wasn’t already.”

“Definitely a staying-in night,” Alice sighed in agreement. “I don’t know if it’s any comfort, Ezzen, but it seems you’re not the only one who needs a better relationship with their mantle and sleep schedule and self-care before we go to war. If we have the luxury of time, anyway; Yuuka, see anything else in that burst?”

“Hm. Not really? What I was seeing as ‘negotiation about mantles’ will just be Izumi talking to Ai and Ezza tomorrow about what just happened, nothing betrayal-ish. Her phone’s floating out there, somebody’s gotta pick that up before the Peacies do. And if I’m seeing something that dim, that’s good, because it’s not the Vaetna killing us. Good job, Ezza.”

“No…problem,” I replied, feeling even gummier now that the clarifying power of my magic had faded, drained from the momentary panic, and guilty about how quickly we’d arrived at suspicion. “We all kinda jumped to accusation.”

“…Yeah,” Alice agreed, tail lashing in self-reproach. “Trust in your teammates is mahou shoujo, so that was a failing on our part. Then again, it is far too late at night for this.” There was a shimmer and a small rush of air as the LM of her mantle dissolved and her pajamaed body redeployed in its place. “I’m gonna check on her and head to bed.”

“Me as well, without the bed,” Ai said as she went for my door. “Take a shower and get some rest, Ezzen. If you still feel bad in the morning, well, Yuuka is right: we’re going to be doing lots of mantle work tomorrow no matter what.”

Author’s Note:

Hasshadai means launchpad. Fortunately it doesn’t seem to be necessary after all! Is it mean and cruel of me to do another fakeout for the actual opening of the conflict? Perhaps! But also, Ez is having a time. On the one hand, it sure is a relief to know you’re not about to be imminently killbliterated by your parasocial idols and instead only have to worry about armed conflict with the entire western military-industrial complex, isn’t it? On the other hand, when your body image issues are now starting to verge into actual disassociation, maybe a bit of murder can help take your mind off things. Izumi knows what I’m talking about!

On that note, I have art to share! Not official, but instead a wonderful bit of fanart of Ezzen that was shared in the Discord by fudgecakedevil (instagram link):

The unidentified fucking thign!!! I love this style and am incredibly grateful there are people willing to take the time to make art purely because they enjoy the story. I am also paying people to make art, of course — if we’re lucky and the timing works out, the next commission will correspond with Sunspot’s 5000 follower (RR+Scribblehub) milestone. We’re 99% of the way there as of writing this!

That’s all for this week, really. Thank you to the beta readers as always. This chapter went up a few days early for patrons, which I’m happy about and aim to keep doing, but otherwise there’s not a lot to report. See you all next week!

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March 1, 2026