If one were told that there was something in the corner by someone running on a life-threateningly severe sleep deficit, most rational people would find it easy to dismiss. But Takagiri was a flamebearer, and things are often weird for us, especially when it comes to what we see. The eyes are the window to the soul, after all. So, just to be on the safe side, the first thing I did was yell.
“EBI!”
This didn’t actually summon Ebi like a spirit from the ether; as far as I was aware, she was still up on the eighteenth floor, and we were in the basement, and it still took time to traverse the space between. However, she was hooked into all the CCTV cameras, the PA system, and, let’s face it, probably also my phone. In a split second, she heard me, reviewed the footage, and relayed my panic to Ai. Moments later, the Emerald Radiance charged through the door to join us.
She entered with superhuman physicality, nearly shoving the door off its hinges and launching from the threshold to right in front of us in what felt like a single step. The tattoo on her back was aglow, softly shining through the fabric of her ratty tank top in most places but retina-piercingly bright where it peeked out at her shoulders and the base of her neck. The emerald ink burned near lime as the Radiance stared at the corner Takagiri had indicated.
“Ebi says there’s nothing on the cameras. Izumi-san?”
Takagiri replied in Japanese, sounding unsure enough that it was clear she was saying something along the lines of “I think I’m hallucinating.”
Ai nodded and materialized something into her hand—a pair of what looked like snowboarding goggles, its lens reflecting the room in blue. She pulled it onto her head and stared into the corner.
“Nani mo nai.”
“J—just a hallucination, then?” I asked, uncertain. My non-existent hackles were raised—removed though they were by blood magic—and my skin crawled with the insistence that something was there, despite all evidence to the contrary. I forced myself to relax, trying to focus on the exceedingly awesome tech Ai had whipped out. “What do the goggles do?”
I knew the answer, of course, but this was a self-distraction tactic to force some normality onto the spookiness, not genuine interest.
“Ripple visualizer.” She pulled the headset off and checked the top edge of the padded rim for something. “A little red and pink in the walls, but that’s just Ebi.” She put the goggles back into her pocketspace, apparently satisfied, but cast a suspicious glower at the creepy corner just to verify, as though her unmodified meat-eyes might reveal something the ten thousand-dollar detection equipment hadn’t.
Takagiri, for her part, was alternating between doing the same and rubbing her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Kieta,” she muttered. “Gone.”
Ai nodded, at last willing to turn her back on the empty corner and face us. “I’m going to call it a hallucination. Izumi-san, mou daijoubu nano?”
Takagiri nodded several times, a small, jerky, repetitious motion that seemed to be more to reassure herself than to reply to Ai’s question. She muttered something in response, then said it again in English.
“I don’t want to be here.”
“Okay. Ezzen, save what you’re working on, and let’s go somewhere else—my office.”
“Huh?” I blinked. “Oh, yeah, sure.” I scooted my chair back in to reach the keyboard.
As my hand wrapped around the mouse, I felt something wrong. The joints of my fingers ached. That wasn’t the most uncommon thing in the world, but it was usually a product of the weather, and it simply wasn’t cold enough in here for it. And as far as I knew, the only other thing that caused my hand to ache like that was—
“Red ripple.” I turned to Ai and raised my makeshift ripple detector.
She understood my meaning immediately and pulled out the goggles again, tugging them over her head in a hurry, ignoring how the strap caught her ponytail against her head. She frowned. “Nothing.”
As she turned back to me and Takagiri, though, she froze and sucked in a breath. Takagiri looked woozy, blinking repeatedly, and was wobbling on her feet. The ache in my fingers spread to the stump of my foot as Ai and I realized simultaneously that Takagiri was the source of the ripple. Ai reached out and grabbed her wrist, and Takagiri jerked to wakefulness with a scream. She looked around, crazy-eyed and terrified, as though not remembering where she was.
The pain in my hand spiked to a boiling throb as Takagiri locked eyes with Ai—then began to ebb away as she shuddered and sagged against the wall. She sank into herself, heaving sobs of terror that pulled at my heart. Ai immediately dropped to one knee to console her while I stood there, awkward and unsettled. I wanted to help—but first, I wanted to get the hell out of this room. I turned and cast one more wary glance at the corner that had started all this; still empty. Ai noticed and asked Takagiri something, presumably whether she still saw anything. She shook her head slowly, nonverbal.
We cleared out anyway. I spent the next minute still awkwardly standing there while Ai coaxed Takagiri to her feet, encouraging and soothing, with all the protective care of a big sister despite being easily twenty-five years younger than the Hikanome leader-assassin. As she finally convinced her to get up, the Emerald Radiance shot me a glance full of worry and suppressed panic.
We were running out of time.
Ai took Takagiri to the prosthetic fitting room to make sure she was alright—even aside from the psychological effects of whatever she’d dreamt in that micro-sleep, spilling out that much red ripple just by existing was never good. I would have come along, but this wasn’t my specialty; my way of helping Takagiri lay in helping the Radiances bring Sugawara to justice and end his nocturnal assaults on her mind, and that meant I had to keep working on the mantle patch.
I awkwardly wished them luck and returned to my room to keep working, hurrying to get as far away from the creepy encounter as I could. That meant another trip back down the basement hall, some time going up the elevator, and a half-hobbling walk across the landscape of beanbag chairs that made up the upper-level common area. The whole time, I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting yet hoping not to see…something. Sugawara’s ghost, I suppose. By the time I returned to my room, my nerves had settled somewhat, and once I threw off my shoes, disengaged my prosthetic, curled up in the big, padded chair Ebi had gotten me, and booted up my PC, I felt better. At least now I had something else to focus on.
It was wonderful to have my own proper workstation again, and this one was far in excess of anything I’d had access to previously. With three monitors, I had more screen space than ever before; no more splitting my single screen to have a too-cramped GWalk session on the left half and various documentation on the right, or being forced to tab between them for the luxury of full-width windows. Instead, I now had a full, high-resolution screen of GWalk on the center display, all the documentation I needed on the left, and the right monitor gave me space to always be able to see the chatroom. It occurred to me that I could maybe rotate that monitor to a vertical position to have the chatroom on top and something for music on the bottom, but that was a project for later.
Takagiri had given me enough theory to go off of; the swords were straightforward, and I had a solid picture in my head of how they damaged the mantles, so from there, patching the vulnerability in each mantle’s diagram was only two steps: modify the relevant mechanisms and make sure I hadn’t broken anything downstream in the process. The core of the first step was to address the leak on the gyroscope; Takagiri had briefly described the necessary changes for that, so I knew where I was headed.
The gyro assembly as implemented in the Radiances’ mantles was a gyroscope in name only, with no actual mechanical, electronic, or optical assemblies like you’d see in an aircraft. Instead, the same function was achieved with an {ALIGN}:4-{DIFFERENTIATE} block, which was a cheap, high-resolution way to determine which direction was up as well as account for rotational changes by just multiplexing the four spatial cardinal directions and checking for changes in orientation. It was a standard implementation for when precision was important; in this case, to ensure a clean interface with the senses of the piloting Radiance, because a misalignment between their internal sense of orientation and the mantle’s actual position would render the magical construct basically uncontrollable.
In most contexts, the small amount of free pink ripple exuded by this approach was negligible; within the information-altering domain of pink ripple, the particular effect of this leak would usually just pigeonhole into some minor color distortions on nearby photographs, or maybe key changes in music if there happened to be any. But Takagiri’s swords, and any other anti-mantle weapons wielded by other Sugawara loyalists using the same principle, were specifically designed to use this free ripple to damage the gyroscope upstream in the chain and, from there, mangle a bunch of other systems downstream, so this ripple had to be addressed. It was essentially a cyberattack—leak, vulnerability, exploit. So I needed to make a patch.
I could have replaced the gyroscope assembly wholesale with another approach—an LM imitation of a physical gyroscope would be fun to model and wouldn’t have this problem—but that would require testing, which GWalk couldn’t do for this sort of sensory and psychomotive interfacing, not without some extra magical hardware or directly asking one of the Radiances to implement it. And we were still on a time budget here; a full teardown and replacement of a core component of the mantle—which might not even work correctly—was unacceptable when we had maybe twelve hours. Besides, there was a simpler solution: I could just turn the pink ripple into another color with a glyph that could take the color and do something safer and more predictable with it.
Red ripple was right out, obviously, given Amane’s particular vulnerabilities—and nobody save Hina would want their mantle to produce pain as a side effect where not absolutely necessary, nor other sensory effects that would be just as bad for controllability as the aforementioned gyroscope misalignment. Green was similar—coming from an LM construct rather than an organic body, it couldn’t be trusted to reliably pigeonhole into something non-biohazardous for bystanders. Besides, almost none of the glyphs for that color took pink inputs predictably; that was one of the big issues with biomancy.
Orange, the color of ripple concerned with space and distance, was also a no-go. Orange glyphs tended toward spatial distortion, like pocketspaces or the fourspace storage mechanism for the mantles, as well as a bunch of weaving utility glyphs like multiplexers and tension modulators; control flow, in programming terms. Since the actual implementation of all these diagrams was literally weaving Flame through physical space, arbitrarily routing free ripple into orange was almost always a bad idea because it could mess up the whole lattice. Silver and white had no glyphs; they were theoretical models for phenomena more than anything else—barring Yuuka and Miyoko, both of whom interfaced with them glyphlessly. I still didn’t have a clue how.
So, that left blue, the set of glyphs concerned with kinetics and entropy. I could vent energy as heat or alpha radiation or various kinds of kinetic ‘kicks’, all of which were helpful in some situations. In this case though, for the constraints of the mantles’ function and concerns about collateral damage, the obvious and most widely used candidate was {SEVER}. In the diagram, I stuck it in right after the {DIFFERENTIATE}, and a little tinkering with tension and orientation gave me what I was looking for.
What were we severing? The water vapor in the air. Being able to break hydrogen from oxygen was an enormously important process for modern power generation, one of the key ways that magitech had changed everything at an industrial scale—but for this application, I only cared about getting rid of the pink ripple, and {SEVER} was elegant because it was no awkward kinetics, no heat, and no radiation—just hydrogen and oxygen into the surrounding air, and in fairly negligible quantities.
Implementing these changes was a lot of dragging, dropping, changing numbers in boxes, hitting “Build,” and tweaking the numbers again until everything worked how I wanted it to. The {SEVER} had to lead into the rest of the mantle, like the {DIFFERENTIATE} had originally, so it was important that it didn’t mess with the pink signals that were actually being used, only the leakage we were trying to get rid of. This was something GWalk could optimize for me, with the right constraints in place, but I still felt obligated to give everything an eyeball check.
The downstream effects were slightly different across each of the three mantles I was working on; the gyroscope module was the same, but in Hina’s mantle, it also fed the fourth dimensional position and rotation data directly to her neural link, since her mutated brain could take it, and that needed some extra work to integrate. By contrast, Alice and Yuuka’s mantles had intuitive controls for movement in the third dimension, but they had to traverse the w-axis via instrumentation. I wondered what it would take for me to also be able to freely and naturally move through the fourth dimension the way my girlfriend and the Vaetna could. I’d been helpless when trapped outside reality—locking onto my spear to return to Earth had been a clever bit of magic, but conditional, and it hadn’t been as automatic as just stepping kata-ward back home. I wanted that freedom.
I also wanted to take a break now that the broad strokes of the solution were in place. For the first time in two hours, I relaxed my focus on the GWalk window and datasheets and diagrams and sat back in my chair, letting my other senses and awareness of my surroundings seep back in. My neck hurt, for one; I’d been sitting too far forward. I twisted it this way and that, looking for a satisfying crack, but got none. Instead, I was alarmed to find that my usual range of motion had expanded; I could turn my head well past my shoulder without discomfort; more of the changes to my flexibility that I’d seen previously.
“Hm.”
I experimentally unfolded my legs from under me and hefted my right shin in my still-weak arms. I lifted my foot to my chest easily, knee and hip swiveling easily to accommodate the motion. I went even higher, until my heel touched my chin.
“Wow.”
Giddiness swept through me. It wasn’t super strength, or speed, or four-dimensional freedom, but it was still unmistakable proof that I’d been altered, mutated beyond the old boundaries of my humanity, becoming something more. We really had to document these more properly with Ai once she was less busy trying to keep Takagiri alive.
I took the giddiness with me to the chatroom, pulling it over to my main monitor. It had been buzzing along to my right throughout the process, but mostly fallen outside of my attention as I had become engrossed in the engineering task. Now, though, it was time for a proper check-in. Early afternoon in Japan was late evening for the Americans, and many of us kept poor sleep schedules, so it was pretty active around now. Unfortunately, this meant I happened to walk directly into a topic that was rather close to home.
starstar97: this kind of speculation doesnt help anyone. the official statement from hikanome put it very clearly, they’re not gonna pursue legal recourse, and todai’s paying for everything
ks3glimmer: that doesn’t absolve sapphire of responsibility! she attacked thousands of civilians, and hundreds of them are going to have long term ripple sickness. there have to be consequences beyond just paying fines. that was barely an apology
Glimmer was at it again, I saw, rapping my fingers on the keyboard as my good mood soured; a mild benefit to my sharp reduction in chatroom presence since coming to Todai had been that I hadn’t had to put up with much of their direct, combative nature. Apparently, my luck had run out, and at an especially poor time: Hina’s official televised apology had just concluded. Twenty minutes ago, according to the clock. I hadn’t wanted to watch it anyway, not when I basically already knew what she was going to say. She’d apologized to me already, after all, and promised to do the same with her teammates. Though based on how my conversation with Alice had gone, I wasn’t sure if she’d actually gotten around to it yet.
At any rate, since the televised apology had taken about twenty minutes, and had ended twenty minutes ago, that meant Star had been acting as Hina’s lawyer here in the chatroom for forty minutes; a noble but unenviable task given that Glimmer seemed intent on painting my girlfriend in as poor a light as possible. Sometimes, I wondered why Sky even let such a combative person stick around.
I decided to intervene, mindful to not make Star’s life any harder by accidentally incriminating Hina further.
ezzen: Hey.
moth30: oh its the uh
moth30: ezzen of the hour
My brow furrowed ever so slightly. I liked the gender-ambiguous turn of phrase, but the message itself felt slightly ominous.
starstar97: hi ez
ezzen: Hi. Anything going on other than the apology?
This did not work.
ks3glimmer: hi ezzen
ks3glimmer: whats your take on sapphire, as someone who lives with her
ks3glimmer: i remember you saying she kinda freaked you out?
“Fuck,” I groaned. I’d forgotten that, as far as the chatroom was concerned, I had a fairly negative relationship with Hina, one characterized by the discomfort I’d felt in the first few days with her, when she’d been feeling me out and courting me via repeated intrusions on my personal space. Summarizing my swing from that state of affairs to the current mess of our relationship simply wasn’t going to be possible without breaking opsec; my fingers hesitated on the keys as I tried to figure out how to express how things had changed.
Fortunately, the rest of the chat also felt that Glimmer’s pivot was uncalled for.
moth30: dont be hounding them, glim
moth30: probably kind of a nightmare in lighthouse right now and trying to make ez of all people incriminate them is just unfair
thanasen: ^
thanasen: ngl ive kinda forgotten ezzen was even there
thanasen: might go refresh on that
thanasen: but yeah, lets drop it here
thanasen: slow day in the lab here
ks3glimmer: -_- i dont feel what i said was particularly out of pocket but sure
ks3glimmer: its not like ebi-furai ever talks about what its like working there so i was just wondering
The others were quick to insist on the change of topic.
starstar97: im good! work sucked but i got pizza
moth30: chillin. you missed the other day’s stream, right?
ezzen: uhh
Five seconds of googling later, I figured out what he meant: there had been a Vaetna stream two days ago, while I was out cold, finishing up the work that had been happening the day I’d been flametouched a few weeks ago. I became a little upset at myself for missing it; three weeks ago, I’d not have dreamed of missing a single Vaetna stream, to such an extent that they had defined my sleep schedule. It was upsetting that I was falling out of touch with the circles that had made up my whole life, even though my actual, material conditions had come much closer to realizing my dream of becoming a Vaetna.
Then again, this time wasn’t really my fault.
ezzen: Was out cold, sorry.
moth30: lmao you don’t need to apologize for surviving
moth30: nice hair btw
moth30: why the change? (if thats a comfy topic)
Oh. Right. Even though my new hair had been a steady weight on my head and shoulders, I’d barely given it any thought and had mostly forgotten it was there—I hadn’t even looked in a mirror since the morning of the barbecue. The orange strands, which had begun their lives as a perfectly laminar curtain of dark LM, were now starting to get tangled and messy, as was inevitable when it was long enough to go down my back. I didn’t actually know how to manage that—just brush it in the shower? I wondered if I could avoid asking the Radiances about it and learn entirely through YouTube. Though the idea of Hina helping brush my hair in my spacious shower was…I shook it off.
More importantly, Moth’s message was a reminder that everyone had seen my new hair. My stomach lurched as I thought of all the Hikanome members holding up their phones, recording me and Yuuka opening the tunnel, and then all the drama at the end of our fight with Takagiri. It was global news—which meant my ill-gotten hairstyle had been immortalized on camera and seen by millions. This would have been bad enough in itself, but everyone also knew that the hairstyle was new, since I’d been caught on camera briefly during my escape from the PCTF. I had mostly been a dark lump in the short, handheld video, but that was enough to indicate the change from brown to neon orange, from neck length to back length.
But it was a change I didn’t hate. Being seen for it felt bad, and it made me feel somewhat exposed, but the actual change of hair was growing on me. And these were my friends. I swallowed and decided to be brave.
ezzen: Thanks. It was an accident, blood magic. I got a haircut I hated and used magic to fix it, then screwed up and changed the color.
starstar97: it looks great!
moth30: ^
starstar97: honestly fabulous while you were fighting, blowing in the shockwaves like that
The compliments made me feel shockingly good, a mixture of relief and just…elation. Was this the rumored gender euphoria? Whatever it was, it was nice. I was a little surprised that seemed to be the sum total of reactions, though. Something compelled me to probe.
ezzen: …No comment on the use of blood magic over glyphcraft?
moth30: even the great ezzen feels the irresistible siren song of unsafe shortcuts
moth30: we’ve all been there
[Direct Message] starstar97: OF COURSE I HAVE COMMENT ON THE BLOOD MAGIC
I tabbed over, relieved she was going with the most direct approach—and was promptly met with the last message I had sent her, the one where I had admitted to her both the act and the fact that it may not have been due to solely Vaetna-related dysphoria. That was probably why I’d felt the need to ask that follow-up question; I’d half-put this out of my mind because it had been right between Alice cracking my gender egg and my dealing with Hina’s moping, and I’d been too physically and emotionally exhausted to check if Star had even seen the message, but some part of me must have remembered that I’d never gotten a reply.
Evidently, Star had not seen the message, and took an uncomfortably long time to follow up. My trepidation slowed the passage of time, far more mundane than when I’d tapped into Yuuka’s silversight but equally glacial, each second feeling like minutes as my best friend composed a response to my gender reveal. I couldn’t take it.
ezzen: pls hit send
starstar97: i see
A too-short message for the time she’d spent typing.
ezzen: …you see
starstar97: HOLY FUCK IM PROUD OF YOU E
starstar97: youre really valid and on the one hand its a little ridiculous that being flametouched and literally joining a magical girl team is what it took to finally crack your egg but on the other hand i know things were really hard and dysphoria haze for you before and im really proud of you for seeing it. thanks for trusting me with this
starstar97: howd it happen, other than haircut? was it like a big moment of realization after the haircut or was it like, cooking over the past couple weeks ever since coming to todai and youre only telling me now that the hair is out of the bag? its fine if thats the case btw, no judgment, i get it. youre way braver than me either way
ezzen: uh
This was a lot at once. “How did it happen” was an insanely loaded question, and one I had to tread cautiously about—as much as I trusted Star, if she knew one of her biggest idols was a trans woman like her, and moreover that Kimura was Takagiri and was therefore also trans, she’d explode. So I employed a little white lying.
ezzen: More like moment of realization, I guess?
I told the story from front to back, beginning with the dreadful, agonizing haircut and ending with where we were now, including the Radiances’ support of me after the haircut but leaving out the revelations at the very end of the inferno and the specifics of my egg-cracking conversation with Alice. Instead, I semi-invented a version of events where I enhanced my body with magic during the fighting—which was true—and that led me to the realization afterward that simply transcending my physical limits wasn’t enough, not in concert with my very strong feelings about my body and facial hair.
ezzen: So yeah, it’s all kind of a big mush of Vaetna transhumanism and, like, not wanting to be male? Or at least not liking a male, human body? I don’t really know yet but I’m trying to figure it out between all the political shit going on over here.
Star had been very polite and refrained from interrupting as I worked through the story, but the moment I sent that message, she pounced.
starstar97: so the radiances knew and now youre out to them. and theyre supportive?
ezzen: Entirely. I know what you’re going to ask next, btw, about trying to get them to help research transition magic in an actual lab and the resources they’ve got. Idk yet.
starstar97: …
starstar97: i mean yeah i WAS gonna ask that but first i was gonna ask about your own plans for transition
ezzen: oh
I hadn’t actually given that any thought—I didn’t even know what my ideal form was, let alone how I’d get there. Star was light-years ahead of me.
starstar97: do they prescribe estrogen over there? is it more of a DIY situation? no way todai couldn’t under-the-table you some, worst comes to worst
starstar97: wait
starstar97: holy shit
starstar97: EZTROGEN
ezzen: :\
starstar97: saving that one for when you come out to the chat in proper
starstar97: (no pressure though!)
ezzen: <3
ezzen: this is a lot
ezzen: Idk anything about transition. Does the word even apply here? All the changes I want can come from my Flame, I hope.
Whatever changes those were.
starstar97: can they
starstar97: thats good then
starstar97: and uhhh maybe you havent thought this far ahead yet buuuuuut
starstar97: whats the over/under on “radiance ezzen”? since you’ve kinda already gone through the gauntlet of a whole inferno event and a fight with them
starstar97: not saying you should identify as a girl and not enby, but uh. you said sapphire said trans radiances were on the table
starstar97: (did you ever figure out what she meant by that, historically?)
I had, but I couldn’t tell Star that. Hell, Hina could have meant either Alice or potentially Sky, and I could divulge neither.
ezzen: I think she was just pushing my buttons. She sniffed me out first.
Despite how close we’d become, I still found myself shuddering at that first encounter with the hyena. She’d clocked me immediately, I realized, in my totality—both transgender and transhuman. Also, the idea of Hina sniffing me in a more literal sense—
I received a ping from the main chat.
thanasen: @ezzen damn ez you’re actually really good looking what the heck
ezzen: huh
A moment later, the attached image loaded—a zoomed in image of my face from when Yuuka and I had made the tunnel.
thanasen: was curious about the hair so I checked some of the videos but even aside from that you’ve actually just got a great face
My heart stopped. Yeah, everyone had seen my hair, because it was impossible to miss the crazy orange even at a distance. But the cameras had also captured my face—shaven smooth, sure, but still immortalized on the internet. They’d seen my face, in detail. My anonymity had been destroyed in full.
They’d seen my face.
Visceral wrongness crashed through me, the same as when the barber’s shears had chopped off my hair. I hated my face; it had become slightly, barely more tolerable to me after I’d forcibly removed all the beard and moustache hair, but it was still wrong. It still didn’t feel like mine, and there was a heart-borne terror at the idea that anybody—everybody—would associate it with me.
The Radiances were one thing, trustworthy, safe, fellow flamebearers; even beyond Alice’s refleshing, they were all well-versed in the art of mask-making, what it meant to separate the private self from the public persona. They had made it literal with their mantles. I had implicitly extended the same grace to the various Todai employees I inevitably encountered in the halls; they were in on the masquerade too, in a lesser sense. But something in me screamed at the idea of being exposed so completely to the world at large, to the masses who would see the meat I called a face and label it Ezzen when it was not.
I needed to cover it up, to replace it with something else, something that was correctly me, the version of me that was right.
My eyes slid back from my second monitor to my first, to the diagram of an entire LM projection of a human body splayed out before me, a fully customizable facsimile. No need for awful, spur-of-the-moment, horrifically bloody and painful sanguimancy this time; I could design the perfect shell, re-establish the distance, the right way, the way I was good at, through lattice-manifest and ingenuity, until the cameras would capture how I ought to look.
I needed to make a mantle.
Author’s Note:
Just a hallucination after all.
Right?
Otherwise a very magic- and gender-heavy chapter, and our first time in the chatroom in a good while! Those of you who have been asking for more complete definitions of the ripple colors and what they do, eat your heart out.
This week’s Radiance poster by Mjeow is of Ai! As a reminder, these artworks are from an in-universe photoshoot for Todai PR, not necessarily depictions of the girls as we and Ezzen are familiar with them. So these are canon but not necessarily their default looks; that cutting insert necklace Ai is wearing is just a prop, for example, and not too much of her work involves her personally using a big ol’ open-ended wrench like this one.
That’s all for this week. As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter!
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The next day, Alice finally found the time to sit me down and debrief the events of the Barbecue Inferno. It was a pale day; the clear and cloudless February sky held nothing to occlude the sunlight as it washed the Tokyo skyline into harsh, neutral off-whites, spilling through the east-facing window of the penthouse’s meeting room and onto the table, bright enough to overwhelm the warmer LED bulbs overhead.
The weather was similar to four days ago, when I’d gone to Yoyogi Park and everything had gone wrong. My phone said the temperature was roughly the same too. This time, though, instead of being shielded from the chill by a reality alteration field of incredible breadth and potency, it was the simple floor-to-ceiling windowpanes, a mundane barrier manifested from Todai’s money rather than Hikanome’s Flame.
Alice had called me in for a general review of that day’s events, but I was impatient to find a moment for my own objective: convince Alice that it was a good idea for Hina and I to go hunting together.
“For what it’s worth, I think you did great,” Alice declared.
I shifted in my chair, tracing my burn scars and savoring the warm sun, such a far cry from the abyssal cold. “Uh. Yeah, I guess.”
This debrief saw neither of us at our best; even with her first full night of sleep in four days, Alice still looked a little haggard, and I was still nowhere near a hundred percent. I’d practically collapsed into Amane’s padded chair after being summoned by the Radiances’ leader. I rubbed my nose, which made Alice smile.
“No, really. Both for the scheduled stuff and the crisis management, I’m really happy with you. Amane says you handled Hikanome’s introduction well. And the…well, not quite an argument…debate about the Spire was good enough. Shows you believe in something enough to stand up for it; they care a lot about that. I think you made a good impression.”
“…But?” I wanted her to hurry up.
“No but. You did well, really!” She nodded to emphasize the statement, faltering slightly as her eyes scanned down her laptop’s screen. “Well, we do have some notes for you, but nothing you won’t expect.”
“Notes?”
“Um…well, nothing important enough for us to talk about now. It’s already in your email, actually.”
A new email, a lighthouse.co.jp address they’d provided me in the rush to settle me in prior to my appearance at the festival. I’d actually already had a contact email, but they’d insisted I also have a second one for official communications. I shrank in embarrassment as I remembered I hadn’t been checking it even before the barbecue—nor my usual one, which now surely had hundreds of communiques piled up from fellow academics. Both accounts had slipped through the cracks—work I’d be putting off even further in favor of self-indulgent, bloody activities with Hina.
If I could find a moment to bring it up, that was, and Alice wasn’t giving me an opportunity.
“Don’t worry,” she insisted, mistaking my nervousness for one of my countless other forms of discomfort. “What’s much more important is what happens from now, yeah?”
I nodded. Was this my moment to bring it up? I looked down at my hands, building up the courage.
Before I could commit to it, she went on, sitting forward intently. Her voice changed, a little more hesitant and careful. “The big thing is that although you did great, Hina…”
“Did not,” I finished, drumming a scarred finger on the table with annoyance that I’d hesitated. I tried to segue into my pitch. “No—no need to tiptoe around it with me. I know she fucked up, and she’s got to make it right.” I took a breath. “I’m—”
“Hm!”
Alice’s monosyllabic interruption made me raise my eyes; her eyebrows had gone up. She seemed surprised. “I’m—yes. Yes. Yeah.” She sighed. “It’s honestly quite a relief to hear we’re aligned on that already. After Yuuka said you didn’t end up breaking up…”
I grimaced apologetically. What had been intended as a breakup had instead only redoubled whatever sort of strange bond I had with the sapphire-eyed girl, and Yuuka had not been happy in the slightest to find I was remaining a monsterfucker. But at least I was trying to help keep her accountable—shouldn’t that count for something in even the crystalline, vindictive eye of Heliotrope?
It counted with Opal, at least. She scrolled her laptop with one hand and rubbed her forehead with the other, trying to find her new talk track from her notes now that she knew she didn’t have to convince me of Hina’s guilt. Her eyes glittered beautifully in the sunlight, and I was momentarily caught off guard by just how pretty she was. They were all good-looking, but Alice’s face was practically sculpted—no, literally sculpted, by her Flame, into her image of her ideal self. With some dragon bits regrettably stapled on.
Facial beauty aside, Alice was also…hot. It had somehow become more uncomfortable to admit that to myself now—was I just attracted in the normal sense, or was I really feeling envy? The soup of desire-like feelings was so hard to suss out, even now that I knew the latter option was there. Neither possibility made it right for my eyes to slide down to her chest, though, and I quickly averted my gaze toward the window again.
That was another opportunity wasted by distractions. Alice was the one to fill the silence.
“They want a public apology from her.”
“Yeah. You said that, I think. Yesterday.” I cleared my throat, impatience battling with the more practical need to know what else Hina had to get done to clear her image in the eyes of both Hikanome and her teammates. “Um. That’s it? No new laws or fines or anything?”
I’d known Hina’s actions would have repercussions for her and Todai, of course, but the exact nature was quite murky. When we’d visited Tochou, Alice had hinted that Hikanome could exert significant pressure over them—a public apology seemed awfully light. Admittedly, Todai was in a bit of an odd spot legally; most VNT groups of Todai’s caliber were either more tightly controlled by whatever nation they belonged to, were quasi-religious ‘outside the law’ cults like Hikanome, or were more like states or fiefs in themselves.
Alice shook her head. “Well, I think you already know we’re paying for the damage to the park…and we’re also footing the bill for treatment for those affected by ripple sickness or more direct injury, to the tune of…” her eyes scanned down the spreadsheet. I wanted her to get on with it, even though I was the one who’d asked for details. “We’re still doing spreadsheets for the exact amount. Three or four billion yen, I’d say, to be paid out over the next thirty years. Technically it’s just a big donation to FVI, but I expect Ai will want to be a bit more hands-on in helping out.”
“FVI?”
“Foundation for Victims of Infernos. They’re like the Asian version of the PARC.”
“Ah.” I understood it when she phrased it like that; the PCTF’s Paranatural Aid and Relief Committee was the organization that had paid my welfare and provided my housing in Bristol.
As for the number, I whipped out my phone to convert to a currency I knew, but Alice preempted me.
“Twenty-five million dollars.”
“Jesus.” That was a mind-boggling amount of money to associate with the magical girl sitting across from me. Not much for a major corporation—technically nonprofit in Lighthouse’s case—but it was all effectively Alice’s money, since the others had little interest in the bookkeeping. The casualness with which she tossed around that kind of sum reminded me of just how powerful she was even in a non-magical sense. I spared another glance out the window, reflecting that it was funny how some of the most powerful people in the country lived in a 20-story building and not the 60- or 80-story behemoths surrounding us. An attempt to be humble, maybe. The Vaetna held no such pretensions.
But then, they were the Vaetna.
Alice shrugged when she realized I wasn’t going to continue from my interjection. “It’s the right thing to do. And that’s not all, of course. We’re paying for damages to the park itself—think I said that yesterday—and probably going to bankroll Hikanome’s next similar event. Which isn’t great for our image,” she added as an aside. “But, er, none of this really affects you, I just wanted to assure you that you did well and all of this isn’t your fault. You did commendably before everything turned to shit and made a huge difference after.”
“Even though I was the target and this wouldn’t have happened without me there in the first place.” I couldn’t help but be a little frustrated. I should have called Hina off, or at least checked in with her or something. It was nice to be praised for how I’d done before then, but honestly, that had all taken a backseat in my mind compared to everything that had resulted from what Hina had done. How had the day even begun? I’d been pink and itchy from my impulsive and ill-advised—though still totally worth it—magical epilation, and I’d been confounded by the air temperature bubble, and then Hikanome’s leaders had decided to ambush me—
My thoughts slammed to a halt and my breath caught in my chest as my idle, skimmed recollections of the pre-inferno barbecue brushed up against something I’d somehow almost forgotten.
“My dad. Uh—did I tell you about that?”
“Oh.” Alice blinked, scrolling with the mousepad. “You did, yes. On the phone. But there were bigger matters at the time. You said Miyoko offered necromancy?”
“I don’t… really know what she offered,” I admitted, feeling unsteady. I starkly remembered the disorienting discomfort of the strange space behind her eyes—seriously, what was it with flamebearers and eyes?—but I was having trouble recalling the exact details the trio had given, if any. “His ghost. To learn more about my flamefall. But it’s bullshit, right?”
Necromancy wasn’t real, not in any meaningful sense. It had been demonstrated that bodies could be animated with magitech, but that was just the magical equivalent of making muscles twitch with an electrode, not resurrection, not something with a soul. The idea of a soul in the age of magic was itself a subject of intense debate, and I even privately believed that there was something of the sort, the place where the Flame met its bearer, but the idea that Miyoko could pull my father’s essence back from whatever great beyond it had gone to was still farfetched. And horrifying.
Alice took an uncomfortably long time to answer. She leaned back in her chair and swiveled away from her laptop, turning to face the blindingly bright window and looking out at the skyline. East, I realized, based on the late morning sun.
“Hard to see it in daylight,” she muttered.
East was Tokyo Bay, and in the sky above it, the scar, the grave of where Todai had once fought a Hikanome necromancer.
“Hongo’s…sister?” I recalled dimly. “Failed to bring back her husband. Though ‘failed’ implies there was ever any chance of success. Which there…?”
“Is.” Alice breathed, more grave and careful than a sigh. She turned back toward me, the end of her tail making a soft hiss as it slid along the hardwood. “It’s—Ezzen, you told me when you agreed to join up that you wanted to understand what happened to your father. Miyoko will have answers. Maybe not the right ones.”
My skin crawled. “…You’re not saying it’s bullshit.”
Alice rubbed her face with a hand. No nail polish—too busy, I assumed. She looked at me intently. “I don’t have the energy for this conversation, and I’m honestly not the right person for it. I’ll…when things are a little less stormy, I’ll gather everybody and we’ll have an honest debate about the existence of the soul.” She said it lightly, almost a joke, but there was something uncomfortable in her voice. Her eyes fled back down to her laptop. “More to the point, I’m so sorry they got the jump on you and isolated you like that.”
“Uh. Oh, yeah,” I recalled, accepting the topic change. Whatever Alice was insinuating, it sounded heavy, and I’d had more than enough of difficult conversations in the past 24 hours. “How’d they do that, anyway? Pull the other people out of the car without me noticing?”
I’d almost forgotten that Hikanome’s leaders had isolated me for my audience with them; it had sort of slipped through the cracks since the rest of that day had turned out so insane.
Alice shrugged. “We don’t know exactly. It’s not their first time doing it—but they should know better than to do it to one of us,” she growled. Her brow furrowed. “But Yuuka wasn’t mad about it, I’m told?”
“Uh. No?” Not that I recalled, at least. A little vexed at most.
“Hm. Odd.” Alice typed something into her notes before her fiery irises looked back up at me. Her expression softened from tense and analytical to something gentler. “She’s got a bit of a complex about abductions, especially regarding Hikanome. I’d have thought she’d raise more fuss.”
“Maybe because she doesn’t like me,” I mused aloud.
Alice paused and stared at me. “She likes you a good deal, Ezzen.”
“What?”
My reply made Alice look very tired. “Take my word for it. Back on track,” she waved the topic away, “it sounds like you’re not too rattled about it, either?”
“I’m fine,” I confirmed hurriedly. But even as my mouth moved, a tangential idea was forming. “Wait, if Yuuka should be mad about that, shouldn’t Amane be furious? Being the actual subject of the abduction that kicked all of this off?”
Alice’s shoulders slumped, and I realized I’d stepped on a bit of a landmine. “She’s good at being angry quietly. Let’s just—listen, if you’re fine, then it’s water under the bridge. It has to be, because we’re not really in a position to demand an apology right now.”
“Okay.” After a moment of awkward silence, I added, “Sorry.”
“No worries. As for the offer they made regarding your father—anything else we should know? Timeline? Conditions?”
“Uh.” I racked my brain. The whole encounter felt a bit hazy and dreamlike in retrospect; perhaps that was a clue as to how they’d accomplished it in the first place, and why I’d nearly forgotten it despite how sharp of an emotional punch it had been, both then and just now. “They wanted an answer in…ten days? Though, er, that was before all the stuff with Hina and Takagiri. So I don’t know if that’s changed. Oh, and it was what they wanted in exchange for support against the PCTF.”
Alice nodded as she noted it down. “Bugger. Yeah. You’re going to have to go, if you’re willing.” She raised her eyes to me briefly and I nodded. “Let’s assume the date hasn’t changed, but it’s definitely not the top priority with them right now.”
This was my chance to bring up what I’d discussed with Hina. “Finding Sugawara.”
Alice sat up, squaring her shoulders and looking regal. She met my gaze. “And putting him in the ground.”
I blinked, surprised by the agreement and open declaration of violence. I’d said much the same thing to Hina, but that was Hina, and I’d come into this conversation expecting Alice to preach moderation and realpolitik. But Alice didn’t even sound resigned—there was a determined edge to her voice. She’d abetted our crime at Thunder Horse two weeks ago, after all. Mahou shoujo destroy evil.
That made this so much easier.
“Um, yeah, I agree,” I began, trying to find my footing for the script I’d written in my head. “I mean it just makes sense, right? It’s free real estate when it comes to clearing the air with Hikanome, but even if it weren’t, we’ve got Takagiri’s condition—what Yuuka and Ai put together is really just a stopgap until we at least have him in custody to understand how to break their connection, but that’s sort of half-assing it, isn’t it, because we could just instead kill the fucker and be done with it, right, and there’s also those two missing guys you sent, which let’s face it, probably means they’re already dead, but on the off chance they’re not, we should really go in guns blazing—and, um, Hina and I messed up by keeping my stalker—er, Takagiri—from you and we shouldn’t have, and so we wanted your permission to go after him this time, all above-board, which in hindsight doesn’t really seem necessary now that—hurk—”
“Ezzen! Breathe,” Alice laughed, unable to hold her composure entirely. “Yes, yes, we’re in complete agreement. Save the oxygen,” she giggled. “We’re going after Sugawara, that’s not in question. Hina especially—everyone involved knows she’d do it anyway, with or without permission.”
“Yeah, I meant—” I took another breath, “I meant that we wouldn’t do it without permission. That’s an—an agreement we came to. Yesterday.”
“Mm. When you were supposed to break up, supposedly.” Her voice was non-accusatory, even friendly, and I couldn’t really tell if she was upset or not. “Got her on a leash now, have you?”
“…Yeah.” I didn’t have a defense for that one.
“Thank fuck,” she sighed, then reflexively covered her mouth. “Oops.”
My brow furrowed slightly. I’d heard her curse worse, for one, but also, we were in the middle of planning a murder. That that was less of a violation of her personal code than simple profanity was interesting—and so was the reaction in the first place.
“That bad?”
She sighed. “It’s—well, after something like that inferno, I figured you were either done—with her or with us—or you were really stuck in it now. And I figured the only way you were going to stick around was if you found some leverage over Hina. Glad to see I was right. Last time was Jason, and he just left.”
“Ah.”
“But you’re staying. And you want to be on the front lines now, do you?”
“Well—I can’t much keep her on a leash if I’m not actually there when it counts, can I?”
Alice’s eyes narrowed, and her teeth flashed in a grin, more devious than her usual sunny, polite smiles. “If you want to hunt with her, you can just say it.”
I froze, then sighed.
“Oh my God, yes, thank you,” I admitted. Despite my lengthy ramble, I hadn’t been able to find the courage to phrase it like that. But that was silly—I’d come into this conversation expecting to have to make this pitch to Alice Takehara, the leader of Todai as a political entity, but she was also Radiance Opal, the paramilitary magical girl squad leader and Alice, Hina’s best friend. Of course she was both agreeing to it and reading the intentions behind it accurately. I still felt the need to justify myself, though. “I just—I want to help. I ought to.”
“And we welcome your support. But you’re hardly fit for active duty yet, are you?” She raised a hand and began to count on her fingers. “In the span of twenty-four hours, you ripped all the hair off your skin, got caught in the center of an inferno, overloaded on green ripple, and had a little jaunt through the beyond where you almost froze to death. Plus you’re not even on your final prosthetic yet. And that’s just your physical condition—pardon me for saying so, Ezzen, but you’d not be magically prepared for direct combat even at full physical health. No mantle, no snapweaving.”
“I rewove my foot’s {AFFIX},” I pointed out, but it was a poor shield from the truth; she was right, I wasn’t equipped to go out and inflict bloody retribution in the tradition of the Vaetna. I sighed. “I’m probably better off just sticking around and helping from the chair, eh?”
She nodded. “Right on. I’m not ethically opposed to sending you out there when you’re ready, if that’s what you want, but for going straight after Sugawara, getting our people back, all that? Leave it to your girlfriend; she’s a lot less squishy than you.”
“But she still needs supervision…”
“You don’t need to be right there with her to hold her leash,” Alice chided, smiling. “We’ll send someone with her—Yuuka, hopefully myself as well if I don’t get tied up. And we’re going to move fast—it’ll be tonight, once Hina makes her public apology and Yuuka’s out of classes.”
“Not…right now?”
“Life takes precedence, Ezzen” she sighed. “Doing it today is already rushing it. I want to make sure we’re on the same page as Hikanome first, and honestly, the difference between doing it now and twelve hours from now is pretty minor. I doubt he’s even in that hospital anymore, or Yokohama at all.” She rubbed her forehead. “As for you: help us prep, stay here, hold down the fort. We’ve got several things you could help with today. Do you feel up to it?”
A little nugget of annoyance sprouted in my chest. I’d made it abundantly clear I wanted to help and didn’t need to be babied. I met her eyes with a nod. “Sure.”
“Great. The biggest thing is that Hina, Yuuka, Amane, and Takagiri’s mantles are all wrecked. I’ve got slightly different tasks for you with each of them.”
“Hina’s, too? Oh,” I realized. “Right.”
“Shorn apart when she did her idiotic dive-pounce-thing, as you recall.”
I winced. Yeah, I recalled; the way she’d dyed the entire world blue for a moment wasn’t something to be forgotten easily. “Does she even need it?” I mused aloud. “What with the strength and speed and healing factor? She did fine without it for all of the actual fighting.”
“Not necessarily,” Alice agreed, “so she’s the lowest priority, and probably doesn’t need your help. I’m sure she wants it, though.” She accompanied that with a wink before going on. “But Yuuka does need hers, and it was mangled by Takagiri’s sword. I want you to figure out how that happened, help her repair it, and patch that vulnerability. If there are more blades like that—and I’d bet there are—I want us to not be instantly incapacitated by them this time. Takagiri should be able to help there, of course, if she’s…lucid.”
Takagiri was coming up on her fifth day without sleep.
I nodded nervously. “Uh, yeah. Shouldn’t be too hard even if she’s not; we’ve still got one of the swords and all. How’s she?”
“Not great. Clock’s ticking, but the coffin’s Ai’s job.”
The coffin was a euphemism for the box Ai had pulled out of storage on Yuuka’s recommendation. It was leftover tech from right after Amane’s rescue, back when her red ripple sensitivity had been off the charts and they’d needed to be able to isolate her. With my help, Yuuka had foreseen yesterday that the device—little more than some basic life support and a whole lot of high-power red wards—could be adapted to help shield Takagiri from Sugawara’s nighttime soul-incursions and thereby give her the chance to sleep unmolested.
Ai had been working on modifying it since yesterday—pulling an all-nighter herself, apparently, which I would have joined in had my healing-exhaustion not caught up to me soon after my conversation with Hina. I had been intending to go help her finish it up after I was done here with Alice, but now it sounded like I had other work to do.
“Bit of a grim name, isn’t it?”
“For grim purpose,” Alice conceded. “But like I said, leave that to Ai. As for your part in helping our guest…her mantle was completely obliterated.” She rubbed her forehead again, clearly unhappy with that outcome given what we had learned about our opponent barely two minutes after that. “Obviously, I eventually want you to get it back up and running—she looks miserable in the old guy body, and I can’t imagine that’s helping her mental state. But more pertinently, she can do independent piloting. I’d love to know how.”
“What about the bomb?”
“What about the bomb?” Alice sighed. “We don’t know if it’s even in there. If you do find something attached to her soul, some last-resort horror Sugawara cooked up, then we’ll stop and reassess.”
“Okay. Uh…to recap, fix Hina and Yuuka’s mantles and get a schematic for Takagiri’s.”
“Yes,” she grinned, apparently pleased with my basic recollection. “This is all in your email too,” she added as a not-so-subtle reminder; I winced a little. She glanced down at her own notes again. “I think that pretty much covers it. Uh, Amane’s mantle needs some reconstruction too, and while I’m sure she’s more than capable of dealing with it herself, lend her a helping hand if she asks, would you?”
Something that sounded like resentment had snuck into her voice near the end there; frustration with her girlfriend’s stubbornness? She reached up and touched her forehead yet again, wincing. Always the same place.
Alice caught the direction of my eyes and lowered her hand hurriedly. “Just a migraine.”
“Uh huh,” I replied, an unpleasant theory beginning to form. “You didn’t wind up getting any more dragon-ka, did you? Um—as long as we’re talking about dealing with it yourself,” I explained. “I did offer to help.”
“Nothing,” she said. “If I have a problem, you’d know. Sort of hard to hide the tail getting longer, heh,” she chuckled mirthlessly.
“I meant…horns,” I clarified, tapping my own forehead in the same place she’d been touching.
Alice stared at me. “No. Nope. Not happening. Nope.” She twitched. “You’ve got a lot more urgent stuff on your plate, so just—don’t worry about me, alright?”
“Are you sure—”
“Really, Ezzen, it’s so nice of you to be concerned, but there’s really much higher priority things going on.” She stood abruptly, slamming the laptop closed. “And we’re out of time for now, anyway—I’ve got to run off to meet with Shibuya’s mayor.” She power walked past me and out the door, leaving me alone.
I frowned slightly at Alice’s retreating form as she exited the room. The glimmer of her tail’s scales shifted from reflecting the greyish blues of the outside sky to the warmer indoor lights as she went down the hall. I squinted past the twinkle and tried to assess the draconic limb as a whole, deciding it looked no more massive than usual; I believed her on that front. I just didn’t trust that she’d not undergone any additional transformations from the magic she’d done during the inferno—Yuuka had certainly been worried when she’d punched the tunnel open, and if the precog had concerns, so did I. It stood to reason that Alice’s Flame was lining her up for horns of some sort. Those were plenty draconic, weren’t they?
I hoped I was wrong, of course—more stress was the last thing she needed. I felt bad for even bringing it up, honestly; if I’d known it’d spook her so badly, I wouldn’t have said anything. Stupid. Should have waited for actual evidence.
I tried to put it out of my mind as I lurched to my feet. Foot and a half, really; in theory, I was due to go through the prosthetic designs Ai’s underlings had whipped up, but neither she nor I had the time right now, and honestly, I was much more looking forward to getting some glyphcraft done. Even though I wasn’t going to come along with tonight’s operation, I still had my own part to play, magic to work, mantles to upgrade—starting by reverse engineering Takagiri’s swords.
Thankfully, Takagiri herself was lucid after all. She’d been staving off the ever-encroaching exhaustion by making herself useful, primarily with the coffin itself, but she’d also done me the kindness of actually mapping out how she’d made her swords sometime in the past few days.
We were in another basement room across the hall from Ai’s workshop, a few doors down from the prosthetic fitting room. This one was basically just a computer lab for Ai’s students, maybe thirty computers in three rows of ten. It was empty except for us.
“So it really is pink all the way through,” I muttered. “Hits the control circuitry directly, not the structure.”
“Yes. The parallel {RESONATE} pair here makes the…beginning? The entry on contact.”
“And from there it does a few {INFERENCES}, yeah, and then just hits…” I glanced over at the diagram for Yuuka’s mantle I’d pulled up on the screen. “This part, right? The {ALIGN} before the control manifold. Throws everything out of sync, and then it hits the manifold and…what, crashes the motive connection? Oh, but there’s fallbacks…which don’t land,” I decided, trying to follow the chain of execution in my head. “Or rather, they do kick in, but the gyro module is already done for, so they get the wrong data.” I squinted. “That doesn’t look right.”
“Because it’s not,” Takagiri confirmed, pacing back and forth carefully. She said it helped her stay awake, and who was I to contest that? Her motions were a little jerky and delayed; she looked so bad that it dismissed any residual danger I might have felt around her. She was old and beyond exhausted; in no position to hurt anybody even if she wanted to. But her focus hadn’t wavered, and her voice was steady as she explained. “The gyroscope portion of the manifold leaks pink. Not normally enough to matter, but enough for the sword to overload it. If you fix that, the sword would only cause a momentary interruption.”
I was impressed by her English, at least for this highly technical stuff. I supposed it made sense that if most of the Radiances were fluent in the vocabulary necessary to upgrade, operate, and repair their mantles, then so was she, having effectively copied the design. Maybe it made sense especially for her, since it was—had been—her lifeline to what she considered her true body. How much had she upgraded it, beyond the dual-piloting capability we’d already seen?
“Oh, the gyro. That’s why Yuuka, uh, fell over, and then the control circuitry was all fucked. You’ve already got the fix in your own mantle?”
She nodded. “I just routed the free ripple into {SEVER}. I’m sorry I haven’t recreated the diagrams for the whole mantle. I think if I sit down in front of GWalk for too long, I’ll fall asleep.” As if by nervous tic, she prodded at a patch on her arm—a caffeine drip—fussing with it as if worried the adhesive would come off.
I didn’t really know what to say to that. “Uh. Okay. Yeah, {SEVER} should work,” I affirmed, as I glanced over the diagram of Yuuka’s mantle. If it worked in Takagiri’s, it was good enough for at least this quick patch. “You copied theirs just from observation?” Takagiri didn’t respond, and I looked over at her. “Takagiri?”
She blinked and pressed the patch against her arm more strongly. “Hai—yes.”
“Insane.”
I meant it as a compliment, but she frowned. “I know it’s not normal.”
“Uh—no, I meant I’m impressed,” I clarified. Maybe not the best phrasing to use with somebody slowly losing their grip on reality. “Like, I wouldn’t be able to do that. Maybe a shitty copy of the basic functionality, but not to the same quality, and definitely not with the upgrades you made. It’s not…well, I don’t think ‘normal’ plays into it at all, really. You want what you want, yeah? And from this…you must have wanted it really badly. I—I get that.”
Her eyebrows went up. “You do?”
“Yeah, I mean, like, remaking yourself in the image of something more.”
“Like the Radiances.”
I twitched. “Uh…no. Sorta? But it’s like—not the way you do, I think. The things they’ve got that appeal to me are the things they share with the Vaetna.”
“Not their beauty?”
That brought me to a total halt. “I, uh. I guess? I mean, everybody wants to be attractive, right, and I don’t think most people would mind looking like them.” This was a distinctly uncomfortable topic for me, of course, with how much I tried not to think about how pretty my flatmates were. Even after over a week of acclimating to them, I’d still failed to stop my eyes from wandering between Alice’s most attractive features earlier.
Takagiri paused her pacing and gave me a Look; something between mirth, exasperation, and empathy. She shook her head slowly and emphatically. “No, Ezzen-san, not most people.”
“Oh.” Oh no. “Really?”
“Really. I’m very jealous of them.” She ran her hand over her mouth and flinched at the stubble on her body’s male face. It squeezed my heart. “I made my mantle, let Sugawara do…what he did to me, because I want what they have. The beauty, the youth, the freedom, the…woman-ness. Is there a word for that?”
“Femininity?”
“Femini—femininity,” she repeated, working her way over the repetitious syllables. “Ah, yes, that makes sense. But you came to them without wanting that? Or without knowing you wanted that?”
“I mean, I didn’t have much choice in it.”
“You chose to stay.”
“…Point.” I didn’t like this conversation. “Uh—so just fix the pink leak on the gyro, and your swords—or copies, which I’m assuming Sugawara’s dudes have access to, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation—won’t fuck with the mantles?” I looked at the diagram again. “Well, wouldn’t break them. There’s still the interrupt. Maybe the control circuit needs sheathing.”
“It does. You’re avoiding.”
“Avoiding talking about…gender stuff with you? Being trans? That’s ‘cause—we’re not in the same situation. You want to be like them, sure, that’s your prerogative, but don’t assume I’m the same.”
She raised her hands apologetically. “My mistake. I just thought you’d understand.”
And maybe I did. Maybe I knew exactly what she was talking about. But I didn’t want to talk about it with her—I was far more comfortable talking to the Radiances about this, because…I’d known them a few weeks longer? Just some implicit understanding that had come from living with them? Because they were visibly, irrefutably girls whereas Takagiri was wearing a male face right now? I kicked myself mentally for that last one.
“I…you’re sleep deprived and overreaching,” I declared, trying to separate myself from the conversation by pulling up Alice’s and Hina’s mantle diagrams alongside Yuuka’s to drown the topic under a flood of interesting stimuli for my magic-obsessed brain. “I don’t want to…get into all this until stuff has settled down more.”
I said that instead of “I don’t want to be friends,” which was a bridge too far, unfair, and a little mean. The diagram before me was evidence of her own genius at glyphcraft, and I could acknowledge that, and I did want her as a peer. But she was intruding on an emotional process I wasn’t ready to expose to anyone outside the gaggle of women who’d adopted me, not yet. Besides, she had tried to kill or abduct me a few days ago, and forgiveness only went so far.
Takagiri didn’t say anything in response. I turned to her again, wondering if she was having another sleep-deprived space-out moment—and jumped in my chair at her expression. Her eyes were fixed past me, over my shoulder, peeled wide open. There was terror etched into her face, deepening the lines of middle age into a rictus of awful recognition. My eyes followed her gaze, dragged along, dread and terror building as I saw she was gazing into a far corner, more dimly lit, away from the cold fluorescent lights in the center. From her expression, I was expecting to see a monster perched in that corner, staring us down. My tattoo itched in agreement, and something in the back of my mind was whispering to reach for my Flame, to be ready to snap into action. But there was nothing.
Wasn’t there?
“Takagiri,” I whispered urgently. “Do you see something?”
She said something in Japanese, muttering to herself, then switched to English. She didn’t take her eyes off the murky corner where nothing was. “He’s here.”
Author’s Note:
And we’re back! Thanks for your patience over the long hiatus. This is a bit of a recap chapter and setting the scene for this arc — I’m hoping for this one to be shorter than Arc 2. Ez and the girls have murder on the mind, and can you really blame them?
New thing: I’ve gotten a bunch of commissioned art done over the break (instead of getting an actual cover done for Arc 3, lol)! The first five chapters in this arc will each have a picture of one of the Radiances down here in the author’s note! The theme for these is that they’re official Todai photoshoots/posters, so this is the public’s image of them, not necessarily Ez’s. The first of these is Alice!
Art by Mjeow, who has done absolutely fantastic work on this whole series. View their portfolio and commission sheet here.
All the art in this series will also have textless versions, which I’ll put up somewhere on the site for if people want to download them, as well as some rad alternate versions that will stay Patreon-exclusive for now until I figure out what to do with them. If you’re interested in seeing these available as real, physical posters you can buy as merch, please say so in the comments or on the Discord — I’m interested in opening a shop for that sort of thing, but I won’t know if people are interested unless you say so. That’s it for these for this week!
Unfortunately lighthouse.co.jp is claimed by another company in our real-world timeline, so I can’t do any funny bits with it, like redirecting it here. Oh well.
As always, thank you to the beta readers for helping with this chapter! We recruited three new betas over the break: Altrune, mirrormatch, and Enigma, and they’ve done a great job.
That’s all for this week! It’s great to be back. See you next Friday!
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