After ten hard minutes of chaos, Yekase was spent. She dragged a one‑legged, sparking carcass like a gutted eel and slipped into Professor F’s energy barrier.

Ling Yi and Crimson Field covered the flanks and filled her gap like stones wedged in a floodgate. Reliable as bedrock.

Twenty whole minutes crawled by like cold syrup. Yekase still didn’t step out of that chalk‑circle prison.

“Doc! Does your HP regen take this long? You slacking in there?” Ling Yi swept out a [Blazing Rekindle] like a brush of fire, cleared the nearby bots, fell back to the barrier, and peered inside.

Yekase had conjured a stool from who‑knows‑where. The two of them were hunched over a shapeless hunk of mech core, scalpels flashing like fish scales, dissecting with feverish heat.

“…”

They’re probably… doing real work, right? Analyzing structure and weak points, that sort of thing.

“Tsk, tsk. This circuit’s got zero redundancy, seamless from end to end, compatibility maxed. Swap in Flash Energy and it’d still run perfectly. Gorgeous…”

“Ancients and their machines… awe‑inspiring!”

“But there’s the era’s ceiling. For example here, this transistor mimic—wait?”

“Is this a—trinary computer?!”

“Holy—trinary! Holy crap!”

…

Take it back. They were just playing high.

Half resigned, Ling Yi went back to mowing down bots. After a few more minutes, Yekase stepped out of the barrier, cheeks bright as coals.

“Alright. New objective: capture a live sample!”

“Doc, you finally lost it?!”

“These sentry bots run trinary computers! Trinary flared and died in modern history like a night‑blooming flower, then few touched it… didn’t expect it here! If we crack it, all our mechs’ compute can—”

“Fine, then start cracking!”

Good thing Yekase was only mentally overheated. Her hands stayed fast as lightning. In a blink she scrapped several more bots and tossed the carcasses beside Professor F’s pop‑up lab.

Crimson Field’s voice carried like a horn from afar. “Heads up! New high‑tier units with energy barriers in the swarm. Stay sharp!”

“Energy barriers? Isn’t that—”

“Isn’t that a heavy‑mech thing? Big footprint, resource hog, power guzzler. With our firepower…” Dragon God Shark’s voice cooled like deep water.

No—what Yekase actually wanted to say was:

“Energy barriers? That’s free kills.”

Her dagger, [Nayuta], had been designed with a vibro‑disruptor for barriers. After that, there was no room for anything else. It ended up a plain knife that was monstrous only against shields.

Barrier generators are pricey and huge, like iron boulders on a boat; nobody sane mounts them. Professor F’s pocket version worked, but a few energy bolts could peel it like wet paper. Bad in a brawl.

So she’d always called [Nayuta] dead weight. No serial, no name. For a name‑cherishing Yekase, that meant she never counted it as her work.

Time to clear its name.

Right on cue, a bot wrapped in silver radiance strode into view like moonlight in steel. Yekase read its path, pitched a freshly torn mech arm, and blocked the lane.

“Let me see if your shield’s behaving, huh?”

The taunt did nothing, but the bot’s camera turned. It stepped toward her, metal feet like drums.

A nondescript little knife shattered a barrier thin as a cicada’s wing, then slid through the lens like ice through silk.

Yekase drove the hilt to the guard, gave it two sure shakes, confirmed the clean kill, and lobbed the bot to Professor F’s door like a sack of grain.

Didn’t feel that impressive. She frowned. “Omega Ray’s will… what was it again?”

Mind Energy is survival.

Soul Power is mutual understanding.

Neptune Energy has none.

Flash Energy is evolution.

Sorcery, unknown.

Omega Ray… what? Nothing special came to mind. Just a convenient, inexhaustible, high‑grade cosmic fuel.

“…Forget it. I’ll ask later.”

While Yekase’s second wind still burned, the ordinary sentries all swapped to shielded models. An elite twice their size joined, heavy as a thunderhead. Crimson Field couldn’t steamroll anymore and fell back to the four.

But the ceiling kept raining robots like locusts in harvest season.

“Are they endless?!”

Panic nipped at Ling Yi. Yekase had given her two new forms, yet the tide still drowned them.

Yekase herself was a street‑brawl queen. If her body held, she could swing with these bots till dusk and dawn, but armor still wouldn’t fit her.

“We have to move,” Dragon God Shark murmured, voice like surf under moonlight. Her staff had become a trident that gleamed cold as frost. It held the line, but couldn’t push the sea back.

Yekase’s second wind blew out. She retreated into the barrier and sat like a park grandpa on a folding stool, panting fog.

“Professor, any new find?”

“I found… their signal receiver.”

Professor F held up a little mechanical cube like a captured firefly.

“Great. Can it order them to stop?”

“No. It’s one‑way. Receive only, no send.”

So still useless!

Yekase scratched her head. After these days together, she knew Professor F was the real “doctor.” He nailed R&D, training, and big‑picture calls like a craftsman at a forge. But in a fight or on the command line, he had nothing.

Crimson Field and Dragon God Shark were drowning in steel. Ling Yi had no breath left for words. The only one who could crack this—

Was her.

“I…”

Responsibility. Pressure. Trust. A familiar taste, bitter like old tea.

“[Celestial Speech], [Arcane Sensitivity], times one hundred!”

—Bzzt!

“Uu—!”

A hum like a needle drilled her eardrums and blew in her skull. Yekase clutched her head, eyes squeezed shut, and wrestled the flood of data like a net full of fish.

Flash Energy, Soul Power, Omega Ray Omega Ray Omega Ray Omega Ray Omega Ray—

A receiver means a brain. A master node is giving orders. Find the tidy ripple pattern, trace it upstream to the first drumbeat. The source is—

“—Eight o’clock, ninety‑six meters!”

“That close?!”

“Crimson Field, stay and guard the Professor! The rest, with me. We hit the main brain!”

“Got it!” “Understood!” “O—kay…!”

Yekase barely heard them. She pushed off the stool. From her left ear—the side facing the source—blood ran like a red thread.

“All in!”

She gripped her old friend of a weapon and left the barrier—then ran.

Meet an elite? She looped around like wind through reeds.

Meet a small bot? Break it, or vault it like a curb.

Missiles inbound? Trigger [Phase Shift] and slip through like a ghost.

Fifty meters. Thirty. Ten—

—Here!

She looked up. The ceiling looked like any ceiling, plain stone like a gray pond.

The mind behind the swarm lurked behind that dull brick, the snake under the rock.

“From that scan, I finally get it… Omega Ray is a natural trinary signal. We kept using only [1] and [-1], and ignored the real key—[0], the unknown and the chaos!”

She willed, and two things leapt from her case into her hands like birds to a wrist.

One: Professor F’s first‑meeting gift, the latest Omega Ray engine, Overdrive V3.

The other: her pristine design, untouched since birth, her proudest work, the Flash Energy core.

“Uncertain, unknown, blurred… That’s what our machines lack. A wavering shadow born in the slit between positive and negative—”

“The answer is Flash Energy!”

“Which is—the true meaning of [ZEROS]!”

Yekase took an engine in each hand and slammed their output ports together like crossing blades.

In her grip, silver and crimson spun, braided, and spat lightning like a storm in a glass. Miraculously, nothing blew. Ten jade‑slender fingers stayed whole.

“So hot so hot so hot—!”

“What are you, a super‑robot pilot?!”

Ling Yi, barely caught up on breath, started snarking again. She body‑checked a bot off line, and she and Dragon God Shark guarded Yekase left and right like twin pillars.

Dragon God Shark latched onto Yekase’s slip of the tongue. The ice left her tone. “[ZEROS]? How do you know that name?!”

“For someone who studies Flash Energy, doing some quantum speed‑reading and skimming erased history is normal, okay!”

“Is that something you can hand‑wave with Flash Energy?!”

“We’ll talk at home! If we get to go home!”

By then, the blaze from the two engines had swallowed Yekase’s outline like a sunrise. It was so bright the other two couldn’t look straight. A hundred meters back, the other pair watched, nerves tight as bowstrings. All they saw was red‑silver glory erupt and coil, with no clue what it meant.

No explosion. No roar. That eerie light just swelled in place like a star caged in glass, spitting a bolt or two, never flaring wider.

From inside the sphere, Yekase’s voice floated out, sheepish. “Uh… now what? Do I throw it? Do I have to physically throw this?”

Ling Yi finished her wave, palm over her eyes. “Who knows! Maybe try throwing?”

“Then I’m throwing!”

“Is this your usual approach to combat?”

Dragon God Shark meant it as a dry jab. But in a heartbeat, their banter lit a déjà vu in her chest like a lantern behind paper.

“…No. Impossible.” She shook her head hard, scattering the terrible guess like crows.

There’s no way that person… also became a hero—right…