“It’s pointless. Countless dimensions divide the three of us—you can’t even touch me, let alone hit me.”

Lalabel finished, then ignored them both and turned to the boundless dark, an ocean of ink swallowing horizon and sound.

Can she see “possibility” out there? Back on the Causal Horizon, when Yekase looked up at the stars, she could feel information flowing like a river of light. Here, wrapped in pitch-black that smothers breath, there’s nothing. No whisper. No pulse.

Only darkness. Pure and simple.

Her rust-red dress flared in the dark, embers trailing like fireflies, and she moved like a knight back from purgatory. The absurdly long hem scythed clean through Yekase’s body, ghost-cold, bringing no sensation at all.

Her boots clicked across a floor strewn with the world’s wreckage.

She stopped at Lalabel’s side.

Then she simply threw a punch.

Thud.

The girl’s slight frame bowed under the impact, lifted, flipped, and tumbled to the ground.

“Uh?! Why—”

She stared, disbelief splashed across her face.

“Countless dimensions between us? Perfect. Duoluomo’s ability is Ascension.”

The girl in the red dress lunged, fisted Lalabel’s collar. “Looks like my clearance’s now eye to eye with yours. First—let’s change the scene. Make it Twenty Second Squad’s turf.”

Where the mind turns, the world follows; words fall, and law stands.

Just like when Lalabel first dragged them into a differential closed cosmos, the dark around them shattered like glass in a single breath, peeling away to a new world.

Sunset soaked a temple ringed by apartment blocks.

The three stood on the temple’s forecourt.

Yekase remembered this place—ruins she’d investigated after the One-Year War. The site where Elena of the Lily Spear-Sword laid down her life.

A star-born, alien blade appeared in the red-dress girl’s hand. She slung it to her shoulder and leaned forward, a hunter’s coil.

…What is this? That posture… feels—

Like I’ve seen it somewhere else—

“First Form: ‘There Is Light.’”

…

At this distance, with boosted vision, Yekase finally saw the cut.

A black sword-flash crossed without a sound, like night quicksilver.

The building behind Lalabel split clean in two, as if the world cracked a joke.

She cast a wall thick as a fortress the instant the blade moved, and barely caught it. Even so, the surge of pressure scrambled her breathing; she reeled, gasping, hair and poise in disarray.

“My father taught me that. His name’s Ling Youguang. He doesn’t remember me anymore.”

She said it like weather.

Ling Youguang is your dad?!

Why would a retired gigolo swing around anime-grade, physics-insulting sword tech?!

Yekase felt it—the way threads meet in the dark, the way far places and strangers knot into her life. Everything connected. Everyone connected.

“Next stop.”

She blinked, and saw it—what split wasn’t only the building. The entire set fell apart under that single blade, like disposable stage props kicked off, shards and splinters everywhere.

Behind the torn curtain, a new scene waited.

They stepped onto a warship’s deck.

Compared with the giant warship back in reality, this was a small plane. For people, though, it was still a wide, wind-lashed field.

“The center of the first mass strike by the exogenous entities. We lost three of the Steel Ten, and Qiao Feng of ‘Qiao & Qiao.’”

The girl in red explained, her voice like a tour through scars.

Yekase felt she was talking to herself.

Elena, three of the Ten, Qiao Feng—lost on the road of war. Even if Lalabel rewrote causality into a counterfeit 2012, they wouldn’t come back.

At best you stamp them heroes. But does that honor matter to the dead?

So Qiao Feng wasn’t killed by me—thank god… Yekase thought, small relief unfurling like steam.

Lalabel’s emotions surged, a storm rolling toward land. “Why… show me this?! Our fallen comrades—comrades who won’t return—”

She lifted her right foot and stomped, anger striking steel.

With the heel’s impact, the deck around the red-dress girl curled up like iron petals, closing to swallow her; at the same time, the floor sprouted a forest of spikes, set to pin her where she stood.

The girl in red stomped too—no constructs bloomed, but she rebounded like a spring and landed atop the closing iron sphere.

“Lalabel, you said you’d find a road to overwrite the world back to 2012. If that possibility exists—then is there a road to observe everyone directly in 2021? The way Yekase observed me—”

She didn’t finish. The sphere twisted, sprouting dozens of blades that scissored toward her. She had to keep moving, slipping through teeth.

Lalabel drove the iron swords in a relentless chase, shouting, “You think I didn’t try?! It’s been nine full years! Do you know what I’ve been doing for nine years?!”

She sounded cracked, a violin string pulled past breaking.

Yekase’s chest sank, heavy as winter.

Isn’t this where logistics, where a commander, steps in—solves everything for her people?

But no tactic came.

She could force the overwrite by locking down the girl in red. Or she could obey the axioms and beat Lalabel.

She wanted neither. She refused both shores.

Greedy, maybe. But—

She chose to steady them first. “Hey, can you let me say a few words—”

“Ika, don’t talk!”

They shouted in unison, and tangled back together, leaving Yekase benched in the cold.

She wasn’t like the girl in red, able to burn life and yank a one-off new form right out of her waistband, conveniently tailored for the fight. She could only watch.

Watch—and find the perfect solution—

A way that doesn’t trade nine years of life, yet brings the Twenty Second Squad home—does that really exist?

After fusing Flash Energy, she’d felt her nature shift—more idealism, more emotion, a new trust in intuition.

And her intuition said there’s no free miracle.

Like Ivaris, who stayed on the Causal Horizon for nine years and still found no way to return in the flesh—and in the end, gave her life to Yekase.

In quantum mechanics, nothing is a perfect zero. Waking up in another world as a cute girl—possible. But searching for that sliver on purpose would cost more time than the age of the universe.

Lalabel’s plan would fail. Inevitable.

She just kept charging, refusing to admit it.

Yet the fight on the ground flipped. Lalabel had been here longer; she wrested back most permissions and spun scenes to favor herself.

They split the world in front of Yekase. From the center line, left and right were different realms.

The girl in red stood in a classroom ruin—walls broken, desks and chairs tumbled like bones.

Lalabel stood in a base hall of steel and copper, clean lines and gleaming floors.

Yekase knew them both.

The classroom was ground zero, where the exogenous entities first appeared on Earth. Every student and teacher fell there.

The hall was East Asia’s frontline base. It was where those who fought—Twenty Second Squad among them—gathered and planned.

As they battled, scenes cracked and swapped, cracked again and swapped again. Left or right, each place wore a name she could speak, a memory that could cut.

Azure ripples, steel and soil, pillars of pale yellow light—crossing between them, breaking and weaving, until the sky reeled and the sun and moon went blind.

No one knew how long. No one counted how many leaps.

The fight stretched thinner, then quieter.

At last, the split scenes fused into one.

They stood on a land clothed in silver.

Snow sifted steadily around them, but not a single flake touched their bodies. The cold drift fell straight through, then kissed the ground and melted.

The final battlefield of the One-Year War. The place where the Twenty Second Squad and the Cruising Destroyer died together.

The girl in red and Lalabel, both ragged with wounds, folded down at the old dividing line, legs giving way at the same time.

Both spent. Both empty.

Which meant Lalabel had won—because the girl in red would vanish the moment her transformation ended, existence burned to ash.

Unless, now, someone could open their eyes—

Become the observer, and change the possibility.

Yekase.

She walked along the seam in the world and stopped between them.

Lalabel panted, hard and fast, pushed herself off the ground. “Ika… don’t force me. If I have to, I’ll let you die here for a while, then in the new world—”

“Lalabel, are you sure you’ll succeed?”

“—”

Lalabel looked at Yekase’s body, shorter than hers. At a stranger’s face. At the flash at her eye and a smile she knew too well.

“If you truly believe you’re a hundred percent delivering the dream you sketched—going back to the time when everyone lived, even killing me and bringing me back—then do it.”

Yekase tucked both hands into her pockets. No guard. No shield.

“I’ll wait to meet you again in the new world.”

…

“…I don’t accept… I don’t want… to accept…”

…Ah.

Made another girl cry.

Yekase fought the urge to look away, then gently drew Lalabel into an embrace—hands that should have passed right through found warmth.

Lalabel matched her, drawing their dimensions together.

“Let’s make a bet. A small experiment.”

“…?”

“I think overwriting has side effects, sure. But on balance, it helps more than it harms. Ivaris can come back.”

“…Really?” Lalabel’s head lifted, surprise and joy catching like sunlight.

“Either way, I’ll walk that road. And my dreams—reset or not—I’ll realize them with my own hands.”

Behind her, a voice flared. “Ika?! What are you saying?! What do you take people’s memories for—”

“But a change this big—bugs are terrifying, right? So let’s run a pretest. I’ll let you overwrite the world for three days—keep the Twenty Second Squad hidden. If I can remember everything inside those three days, that’s a bug. I win—you drop this imperfect plan.”

Yekase smiled, easy as dawn.

“Then we go together, and find a way that sacrifices nothing, that brings everyone back. I failed once nine years ago, forgot you for far too long. I won’t repeat it.”

“You…”

Facing a remade world, recalling things that never existed?

Can that be real?

Lalabel, for once, warned her coldly: “Ika, I know your mind’s sharp. Ordinary puzzles don’t trick you. But this overwrite—I’m the one doing it. No holes like Ling Ya or Zhang Wendao will remain. All seven billion humans, including you… will deny the One-Year War.”

“Then I’ll deny seven billion humans.”

Yekase said it like tossing a pebble into a lake.

“Yekase…! Ika! ‘———’!”

The girl in the red dress called out all my names from behind, her voice throwing bright pebbles across the corridor.

Even my true name—she knew it, a buried blade suddenly glinting in daylight.

Before the amnesia, we must’ve weathered a brutal fight together, blood and dust like a sandstorm eating the sky.

Yekase’s that kind—at a breaking point, she dumps the locked vault of secrets like a dam giving way.

“By the way, freeze time for the one behind us, frost their moment like glass—I’m afraid she won’t last till I’m back in three days.”

“…Alright, I agree—the words fell like a small stone into still water.”

Lalabel closed her eyes and lowered her head, like a crane folding its wings under a pale moon.

“We’ll wait for you here, stones on a riverbank, patient under the current.

If you fail, I’ll laugh loud enough to shake the leaves, and flip the calendar back to 2012 right in your face.”

“Alright, start the experiment; strike the match in this cavern of doubt.”

Then the world shattered again, a glass sea breaking under sudden frost.