“How much counts as related? How much is not? Like ‘how little hair makes you bald?’ There’s no precise, clean answer—”

“Vague. Indeterminate. Like zero in base three.”

…

Yekase stepped back into the ship’s bright cabin, eyes adjusting like pupils opening at dawn.

Behind her trailed Ling Yi, Ling Ya, Crimson Field, the Dragon-God Elephant, Dragon-God Tiger, Dragon-God Lion, plus that rust-colored Magical Girl with no name, a flicker like iron at sunset.

In front of her stood Lalabel, still as a lantern before the wind.

—Back.

Back aboard the Exogenous King’s ship, the deck where they placed their bet, the stage where a tide turned.

But Lalabel seemed drained of the power to maintain a differentially closed universe, and the mirage shattered like frost.

In every sense, they had returned to the world that breathes.

“So, from day one of the semester, I asked Ling Yi and Ling Ya to seed one-year war clues across campus,” she said, voice like chalk on a blackboard that knew the lesson, “ranging from ‘tightly linked’ to ‘barely related.’ Wide coverage, deep scatter. If some were erased or missed, we could route around and advance.”

“I only meant to test the range of overwriting, but it came in handy,” she added, like a knifepoint slipping a knot.

Yekase, the victor, fulfilled her duty with a clear map of how her heart had steered.

Relief softened Lalabel’s face, like snow thawing under pale sun.

“I knew I underestimated you. I didn’t expect even my underestimation was so deeply underestimated.”

Yekase shook her head, a willow refusing the storm.

“You did enough,” she said. “Beyond this, your edits touch the bedrock of being.”

“People’s cognition and memory would be completely remade. Text and records would blur and fade. My clues would be wiped out like footprints in rain.”

“That stack of blank sticky notes should’ve been filled with one-year war info,” she said, palm empty like a scarecrow’s hand, “but because I recognized the content as I wrote it, the ink vanished.”

Worldline-level change is a tiger; it eats the bones.

Lalabel said she only altered cognition, but the Exogenous King did extra—hid, deleted, swept—so hard Yekase nearly flipped the table.

“However, you missed one case.”

Yekase raised one finger, a candle in a cave.

“Non-continuous, meaningless information—garbage, in plain terms,” she said, like sifting silt for gold dust.

In the witches’ workshop, Yekase once told Sandryon: Listening to all rumors and extracting the true shard is genius.

From a sea of trash, she hauled usable bits—no, more than usable, a compass hidden in driftwood.

No one told Yekase “go look.”

Consciousness born from the unconscious—that’s the hardest birth, a moon pulled from a well.

That note that fell from a history book completed its mission like a leaf riding a current.

“Garbage info… you can even use garbage?” someone breathed, like a wind that didn’t know its own strength. “You…”

Those out of the loop caught a fraction, a glimmer on the wave.

In short, Yekase moved pieces where they couldn’t see, pulling strings they couldn’t name.

It sounded absurd and brilliant, storm-bright and far; they couldn’t measure how absurd or how brilliant, but they could clap for thunder.

This was the moment to cooperate with her swagger and let the drumbeat roll.

“Parrots can’t comprehend what they’ve learned,” Yekase said, voice level as a still lake. “Taught by different people, their words, passed to me, became non-continuous, meaningless signals.”

“They slipped past your overwrite like rain through a mesh.”

She kept her tone calm, as always—calm like snow, calm like steel.

Solve it, go home.

Under the overwritten state, “lightweight Alchemy” was only a sketch, a cloud not yet rain.

Back to herself, she immediately spun up several experiments, ideas sparking like flint, itching to try them in order.

“What a long, long detour,” she sighed. “Lalabel, you know me.”

“Did you think I’d gamble without preparation?”

Her final line landed like a fox’s smile, an evil kindness that tricks the unready child.

Lalabel shook her head, a bell refusing to chime.

“So, you win,” she said. “I’ll keep pushing, seeking a more perfect—”

——BOOM!!

A roar split the air outside the hull, a thunderhead ramming the sky.

The cabin lurched hard, the world tipping like a saucer; Yekase, arms crossed mid-flex, nearly fell.

“What?!”

“Someone’s shelling the ship!”

——Boom! Boom! Boom!!

The barrage hammered on—city defense cannons, a fortress barking fire.

D-class finally responded, of all times, right now, like a late alarm.

“The Exogenous King is down,” Professor F snapped, voice crisp as a blade. “This ship lost its power supply. It won’t survive many volleys.”

“At this rate, we’ll crash into the outskirts of Twin Towers City!”

“Outskirts…”

Months ago, near a breakdown, Yekase rampaged in a junk mech across those fields, carving mud into grief, wrecking crops like a bad harvest.

She couldn’t bear another scar; her last flicker of conscience rose like a small lamp in wind.

“We can only shove the ship into orbit together?!” Crimson Field shouted, heat like iron in a forge.

“Just a ship—watch us push it!” Ling Yi yelled, the same in every worldline, like a river that refuses a dam.

“No,” Yekase said, stopping their fire with a palm like a lid.

“I still carry some residue—energy left by the Magical Girls.”

“If I burn it all, I should be able to resolve this ship.”

She had thought she’d struck gold—several Magical Girl abilities in one armful—only to learn they were trial versions, feathers not wings.

She looked at Lalabel’s body growing faint, half-translucent like morning mist, and understood.

She stepped forward and gently embraced the girl, a hush settling like night.

“Lalabel,” she whispered, “you’re too tired.”

“For you, in this state, don’t light a lamp.”

“You deserve a lullaby (lalabel).”

“Ika… Doctor,” Lalabel murmured.

Even her own condition couldn’t be hidden—like a child lying to a parent and getting caught, she could only smile bitterly.

“Leave this to us,” Yekase said, voice firm as a handrail. “Before you wake, I’ll lay out every condition you need to find that road.”

Yekase cleared her throat, night falling inside her chest.

She began to sing:

“At the mountain’s edge, the moon is full—”

…

The song was airy, winding, like smoke from incense—half prayer, half tale told by starlight.

Lalabel’s eyes widened, gaze sliding past Yekase’s shoulder.

A thousand stars flickered, like salt scattered on black silk; the flowing red scarf became a river of light across the cosmos.

In the whirl of the Milky Way, a silhouette stood against infinity.

A robot, a guardian, an iron hymn.

She knew it.

How could she not? It was humanity’s final line, a stalwart comrade on the battlefield of the one-year war.

—Thunderbolt Zeus.

Tears rose like a tide breaking the harbor.

Zeus’s phantom flowed forever through the deep, a current that never slept; only one thing stayed constant—its engine-like twin wings.

From them spilled endless colored particles, weaving a pair of light-wings larger than the frame, broader than the night.

Like a butterfly crossing galaxies.

The girl stared, mouth soft as a prayer.

“I can see… the moon, the butterfly, and…”

“…a million stars…”

…

Yekase’s arms were empty, a cradle after the lullaby.

“…”

Those wings kept expanding, a halo widening until it covered the hall.

Metal touched by light vanished as if it had never been, drifting to dust like ash on wind.

From here, the night sky unfolded, a window torn in steel.

Thunderbolt Zeus’s phantom beat its wings and began to disassemble the entire ship—shells, lasers, iron and air—reducing all to nothing, leaving no scars.

“Moonlight Butterfly,” Yekase said, brief as a spark. “My dad and I both have a thing for beards.”

This way, the ship would fragment down to the atomic grain, wouldn’t drop onto the outskirts’ fields—a clean, green ending written in starlight.

…But one more matter waited like a shadow behind the lamp.

Yekase turned to the girl collapsed on the deck, breath thin as thread.

Her rust-red dress still threw sparks, fireflies on iron, but anyone could see her time wouldn’t outlast the ship’s.

She was a hero who had sacrificed everyone’s memory of her, even her own existence, to fight—an outline carved from fog.

Yekase could only hold a vague impression; her name and face refused to be known, refused to stick like oil on water.

“Are we… just going to watch?”

No, surely something could still be done—

That was too naïve, a wish sent to a closed sky.

Yekase couldn’t even keep Lalabel; how could she keep her?

Here, she had to choose like an adult, cut with a clean blade.

—Tap, tap, tap.

Footsteps sounded from the far end, like pebbles rapping a drum.

Someone was coming!

Another enemy?

Fresh from high-intensity battle, they tightened grips on their weapons, nerves strung like bowstrings.

Under their tense gaze, a figure stepped into the corridor’s frame.

…Mikala Aura.

“Uh…”

Yekase was speechless, her thoughts slipping like shoes on ice.

At the end of a fierce fight, she appeared like a window shopper, strolling across a battlefield on the brink of erasure.

You wanted to ask, can you be any less helpful?

“The Heavenly Prison King?! Why are you here—”

Unfortunately, almost everyone present knew her, and Zhang Wendao didn’t ask.

No one triggered that classic three-part self-intro and the clacking 3D movable type—small mercy in a noisy night.

“…Tsk.”

She clicked her tongue, annoyed she couldn’t announce herself, like a bell denied a ring.

“My hands were itchy tonight,” she said, grin like a knife. “I slaughtered Exogenous all the way here.”

“Heard noise, thought there’d be fun!”

“Turns out it’s you lot—nothing but acquaintances. Bad luck.”

Not real acquaintances—just people you traded blows with—but she didn’t love lingering past the right moment.

Her gaze slid over Yekase and settled on the red-skirted girl, a spark finding tinder.

“Didn’t expect Ivaris here. I’ll book your greatsword later—oh? Isn’t that ZEROS?”

…

“—What did you say?”

Yekase’s brain jolted like lightning striking glass.

She’d mistaken Yekase’s Magical Girl form for Ivaris—and ZEROS?

The red-skirted girl’s codename is ZEROS—no, that’s not the point.

Why does the Heavenly Prison King know her?

In the circle nine years ago, was there—

“…Ah.”

In that instant, the obvious rose like moonlight over rooftops.

She wondered how she’d missed it this long; perhaps that’s the finest cognitive interference, a veil woven from daylight.

Mikala Aura—Michala·Aura!

A legally youthful dual-personality madwoman, skilled in Mind Energy, able to reshape her own face like clay under will.

Her other identity is the two-in-one Magical Girl—

Aura.