After dinner, Yekase headed out again.

She’d been slipping out at night a little too often lately. Maybe she’d become a normie, she thought, like a lantern finally learning the pleasure of dusk.

Tonight’s plan was simple as a streetlight map: swing by the Foundation HQ, scoop up Jiang Bailu after work, wander the shops, then fly up and watch the moon. Only the last step felt like a bird sentence wedged into a grocery list.

She rode the subway, surfaced under the company tower, and didn’t see Jiang Bailu. She hesitated, then transformed in the elevator, a tide rising behind glass.

“Nineteenth floor… oh, there.”

Too long away, and even the buttons felt like old friends wearing new faces.

She pushed through the Foundation’s doors without a single guard lifting an eyelid. People streamed past like rain lines under headlights, and no one spared a glance for a sailor-suited girl with hands tucked in her pockets, blossoms splayed like ribbons on a breeze.

That was strange, like a drumbeat missing its downbeat.

It felt wrong to praise herself, but she looked exactly like someone cosplaying in a classroom—she should be drawing stares like moths to a lantern.

Could it be the Magical Girl standard kit from cartoons—the cognitive blur aura?

As long as you didn’t initiate contact, your presence sank like a pebble in a deep pond, even close friends couldn’t make out your face—an effect that refused reason like mist over a mirror.

There was one snag. The Magical Girl system wasn’t some cryptic shrine. It was a large Infinite Power machine tethered to a near-Earth satellite, a thing of bolts and math. She’d helped design it—no schematics for a perception jammer drifted in her memory.

The only answer was this: during those nine missing years, the Magical Girls were steeped in the Void Realm. That stain had passed to her and cross-pollinated with her Flash Energy, blooming into a cognition-twisting mutation, a firefly that learned to bend sight.

“Cognition, again with cognition…”

The word gave her a little PTSD itch, like sand in a wound. Still, if transforming made her less noticeable, that was a tailwind. She shelved the why and let herself enjoy the breeze.

She strolled like a cat in a courtyard and slipped into Development.

It was as busy as when she left, a hive under noon sun. Faces had turned over like spring fields, but a dozen familiar pillars still held up the roof, steering the birth of a new machine.

You couldn’t tell what it would be yet—just bones under cloth. Curiosity pricked like a needle, so she picked a shadowed corner and started supervising, eyes a metronome.

After a while, she noticed some employees glancing her way. Their gazes flitted like sparrows; they’d look, drift off, then sigh and go back to work, the way a wave tugs and relents.

So the cognitive blur had a ceiling, a cloudline.

She was about to drift elsewhere and see if the progress bar would refresh, when an old hand squared up and boxed her in against the wall.

Zhang Mingwei, a middle-aged man, looked her up and down. She shrank her neck and felt a cold sweat bead like dew on steel. He frowned and muttered, “Who dressed the maid robot in a sailor outfit? Got too much free time, huh?”

…Uh?

Oh right. She’d made a product that was way too two-dimensional for this three-dimensional world.

And those “Lena-class Maid Robot” prototypes—one of which had self-detonated—looked exactly like Ivaris. Exactly like her transformed self, face like a promise carved into the heart and left to weather for nine years.

Some imprint had stayed in her subconscious, so when she pinched a face for this form, she sculpted the one she swore she would never forget.

The maid robots didn’t have her little Flash Energy cowlick, and their electronic voice wasn’t hers either. But under a blur aura, those details melted like frost in sun.

“Command: deliver this data to Director Jiang.”

He shoved a stack of A4 into her hands, like a pigeon dispatch with ink still wet.

…She’d just been given an order.

Maybe Liu RuoYuan was right. This form really did pander to otaku… like candy floss spun for guilty hands.

If she said “I’m human,” she’d blow her infiltrator cover. Like a lady investigator caught in a sting, she wouldn’t get thrown out, but Mira would definitely detain her and do all sorts of weird things—like unpaid overtime.

“…Command received.”

She swallowed the snark bubbling like soda and kept a blank face, robot-plain, and walked toward the office that once was hers and now belonged to Jiang Bailu.

She pushed the door.

Jiang Bailu lay upside down on the sofa, as limber as a ribbon and just as shocking to the eye, not working in the slightest, like a cat sprawled under a sunbeam.

“Oh, Lena. Which pervert dressed you in a sailor uniform? It’s cute… whose report is that?”

Still head-down, feet-up, she glanced over and asked like it was weather talk.

“Zhang Mingwei.”

Yekase answered by the book.

Jiang Bailu had never seen this form. She filed her as a maid robot, same as Zhang Mingwei.

A small, wicked itch bloomed in Yekase’s heart, like a cherry bomb. She handed over the report, then folded her hands and stood solemnly by the couch, role-playing a robot with priestly zeal.

“Mm… metal fatigue in a new structure… I told them this drive shaft would be a problem, and they pushed it to production anyway…”

Jiang Bailu flipped upright and read, the air of a storm finally turning.

From her diagonal, Yekase caught the diagrams. The joint issue jumped out like a broken hinge. A freshman in mechanical engineering wouldn’t make that mistake.

“Which genius designed this? Send him to tighten screws for a month.”

“Yeah. Anyone who can produce this kind of trash part is no ordinary engineer. Time for a heavy punch…”

Jiang Bailu followed Yekase’s line and grumbled a string, thunder rolling across a flat sea.

Then something clicked. She turned her head, slow as the moon clearing cloud.

Yekase dropped the transformation and smiled.

“Doctor?! How did—what was—that just now…” Jiang Bailu’s hands fluttered like startled sparrows, words scattering.

“My new skill. For now, I’m probably one of a kind.”

Yekase thought it through. Every other Magical Girl was dead, and Zhang Wendao, the last green shoot, was too busy holding his existence together to transform. One of a kind, then, like a single lantern in fog.

…She could think “the Twenty Second Squad is gone” now with a calmer tide, even a strange lightness. People had to face forward. At worst, the next time she booted up Luciferin, she’d use “Twenty Second Squad, advance” as a fixed startup phrase, a drumbeat for ghosts.

“So cute! Do it again!”

Jiang Bailu lit up like a cat seeing laser dot, starry-eyed. The quiet model-student mask she always wore in front of Yekase fell like a leaf.

“Huh? You didn’t seem this into it a minute ago…”

“It’s you inside, Doctor. That makes it totally different! And the sailor outfit is fresh!”

“Fine.” She’d planned to transform and fly anyway. No point playing coy. Yekase spoke the trigger, and light folded; the Magical Girl stepped out, a doll spun from dawn.

“Like a porcelain doll. So cute, so cute!”

Arms wrapped her.

Cheeks rubbed her.

She got lifted, light as a paper kite.

She’d never measured her Magical Girl height, but by the way the world dropped and rose when she transformed, she was shorter by a head. Her normal self barely cleared 160 cm, a precarious ledge; this form felt around 150, the fun-size aisle, practically a handicap in a world of long shadows.

“Bailu, I barely recognize you…”

“Liking cute things is every girl’s nature,” she said, like spring rain claiming every field.

Cute things…

Yekase didn’t blush at the pointer. She felt betrayed—Jiang Bailu, with those straight brows and clear eyes and killer engineering instincts, wasn’t a gearhead. She liked petty-bourgeois moe fluff that softened the spine!

Even if that “petty-bourgeois moe fluff” was, specifically, Yekase.

“How much longer are you working? I want to hit the shops with you.”

“Almost done.”

At the promise of added festivities, Jiang Bailu surged like a wind-up toy. She tossed Zhang Mingwei’s report aside, tap-tapped the keyboard like rain on eaves, shut down, and stood.

“Let’s go.”

And just like that, she left the overtime comrades behind like coats on hooks.

As they left, she told the others, “This Lena’s acting up. I’m taking her to the electronics market for new parts,” which forced Yekase to keep robot-face on a little longer, like a mask glued in place.

They stepped into the moonlight.

The night was clear and quiet, cloudless as polished glass.

Perfect flying weather. Yekase narrowed her eyes and ran a little taste-for-marrow check. Flying under her own power felt like raw adventure stitched with a thread of almost-losing-control. It pumped adrenaline and dopamine like a river sluice, habit-forming as bitter tea.

It didn’t beat the moment a new invention roared to life, but it wasn’t far behind. A second sun in a pocket sky.

“Tonight’s schedule: moon first, a little wine. Then north along Henan Road’s pedestrian street, graze and sip as we go. End at Sun Palace, watch the Kengan Tournament, keep sipping.”

“Your lead, I’ll follow,” she said, like a boat taking the current.

Yekase had never paid much attention to this disciple, but in idle gaps they’d chat, and she’d catalogued two great loves:

Fruit wines of every flavor and proof, and watching people fight, like thunderstorms caught in jars.

She had reason to suspect that, at first, Jiang Bailu joined the Sinister Organization to watch the combatants brawl up close, like a bird nesting by an arena.

It amazed Yekase that only now did she see through the prim veneer to the rogue beneath.

As shock ebbed, she took the initiative like a host at a warm table. “Did you watch yesterday’s opening bout?”

“Watched. I put down a big stake. 1.7 paid me nice and full.”

…A shadow-dwelling fiend!

Yekase didn’t even dare pick medium-risk funds. The word betting made her flinch like a rabbit under a hawk’s shadow.

Jiang Bailu looked satisfied as a cat after cream. “No surprise—the acknowledged strongest, the crowd’s champion, the odds killer. Xiaoyuan, forever a god.”

No idea what you’re saying!

Yekase chuckled, helpless, and held out her hand to the lab coat who looked older than her but was still her apprentice.

“Hand.”

Jiang Bailu placed hers on top, a leaf on water.

“No good. This grip’s not secure. Then we’ll do it this way…”

In a blink, Yekase slid behind her and hugged her overworked, stiff back. “Prepare for takeoff.”

“Eh? Take—”

“Celestial Speech, Steady Flight.”

They shot into the sky like twin sparks.

“—Aaaaah?!”

In seconds they were several hundred meters up. Afraid that higher would freeze Bailu’s bones, Yekase leveled off, the city a circuit board of stars.

She conjured two Oz Floating Discs and sat them down, steady as stepping stones. Then she made a third disc a little higher between them as a table. Her right hand skimmed the air—two white porcelain cups bloomed like lilies.

She reached into the void and pulled a bottle free.

“Wine from Xinjiang. Different method than Europe, low proof. I’m classifying it as fruit wine.”

She filled both to the brim, then hefted one and clinked toward the still-shaken Bailu, the moon a coin on her cheek.

“…Your tricks are getting less and less scientific,” Bailu murmured, breath finding its rhythm.

“Scared you back into good-student mode?”

“I never left it!”

“I’m teasing.”

Yekase grinned and tilted her head back, drank half a cup. Warmth spread like sunrise under skin.

“Good mouthfeel. Not sour, not burning. And anything ‘unscientific’ that exists in the world proves that the error’s with science. That’s true materialism.”

“You’re right. I didn’t expect to get guidance after your retirement…” she muttered, a little yin-yang under her breath, like a breeze flicking a curtain.

Yekase was in high spirits and ignored the shade. “By the way, it’s almost the fifteenth, right? The moon’s so big, so bright, so round. And for once, no ads slapped across it!”

“Mm. It’s near,” Jiang Bailu said, and took a gentle sip.

Sweet-sour, crisp, a lady’s small wine. The kind that leaves a blossom on the tongue.

Yekase made three sips into two and drained the glass, the wine going down like a warm ember. She poured herself another.

“The wine’s perfect, the moon’s a silver lantern, and you’re here. Ready to stay up till dawn?”

“Uh? I’ve gotta punch in at dawn tomorrow…”

Her answer snapped like a cold wind: “Don’t go.”

She blinked, surprise fluttering like a moth. “Huh?”

“Tell your boss—if they won’t give you a day off, you’ll retreat to the mountains like the Doctor did.”

“My courage folds like paper; I don’t have your walk-away guts…”

“You could—courage is a spark, and it’s yours to strike.”

Yekase held her gaze, the whole glass sinking like a small sun. When the warmth surged back, her cheeks bloomed like peach petals, and her eyes misted like a lake at dawn.

“At least on a night like this, be only yourself—an unalloyed miracle, quiet as fireflies under a silk-dark moon.”