“So the patients irradiated by Neptune Energy…” Her voice thinned like frost on glass.

“So far, no cures.” The words fell like a lid of ice.

…

“…I see.” The reply drifted like a leaf.

Yekase curled into the booth’s sofa like a cat seeking the last sliver of warmth.

It was past midnight. Late-autumn chill pooled in Valhalla like low fog. She wore a blanket like a cloud shawl, though the subtropical swing of Twin Towers City barely touched her body anymore.

Professor F sat behind the bar, fingers drumming the keyboard. The blue switches crackled like dry rain on tin, and the cramped underground filled with that electric patter.

After they resurfaced, Yekase first set Jiang Bailu home, like setting a lantern back on its shelf. Only when Ling Yi made it back did the knot in her chest loosen.

Not long after, the perpetually late Mobile Warrior ZX sauntered in like a comet missing its window, helped haul away the Sun Palace’s rooftop wreckage, then vanished into the dark.

She was dead tired. Her fingers felt like frozen twigs, and her Sorcery had ebbed to wet sand. She hadn’t tasted this near-limit fatigue since coming back from the Causal Horizon.

But rest felt like surrender; she couldn’t lie down. Regret sat on her ribs like a cold stone. She knew there’d be no sleep with a hole that big torn open.

After seeing those eyes, if she went home and slept soundly, she’d be no different from Emerald Pool’s rookie devs—faces of mud, nerves of wood.

Yekase had killed fighters, many. Their last looks were a tide—despair, rage, fear. If she had the breath, she’d meet their gaze until the thread of life went slack.

But that nameless Emerald Pool representative was different. He didn’t die as a fighter, not even as a person, but as a tagged animal for a vicious experiment.

By dawn, Emerald Pool Industrial would take no real hit, only paper-thin censure. In the gray, their supply chain would grind awake like gears oiled with blood, bowls and basins brimming with profit.

“Doctor, breathe first. Emerald Pool’s sphere is already C-grade,” Professor F said, calm as a still pond. “You can’t solve that by storming a base with a mech or two. If you mean to break it, we plan first. Full board, clear tactics.”

“I understand…” The words were dull as a nicked blade.

“The lucky part is, I’ll plan with you.” She rounded the bar with two bright cocktails, their colors like signal flags cutting fog.

“Luckier still, this one’s on me.”

“That is lucky.” Yekase’s mouth lifted; cloud broke for a patch of sun. She took the condensation-beaded triangle glass, cool as dew, and studied it.

Red, white, and blue in three calm layers, pretty as a tricolor horizon. When she swirled it, they barely mingled, only smudging at their fault lines.

Professor F slid into the opposite booth, raised her glass. “Doctor, doesn’t our society look like this drink?”

“How so?”

“The bottom blue is the ordinary folk, laboring hard, peeled layer by layer. The middle white is the Sinister Organizations, big and small—oppressing the small while pressed by the larger. The top red is Shadow Curtain International. Three strata, close but unmixed, stiff as sedimentary rock.”

“No, you’re off, Professor.”

“Where?”

“Look at the glass. The bottom blue is the least; the top red is the most. To match reality, flip the whole thing. The many become the base, crushed by a few hegemons. That’s closer to truth.”

She nudged the straw and drew off the pearl-white middle.

A faint heat pricked the tongue like a spark, but no bite of alcohol. “Lychee soda?”

“Bingo.”

She eyed the colors and had expected vodka hiding there; instead, a soft fizz. She pinched the straw again and sipped the red.

“…Strawberry?!”

Yekase stared at Professor F, incredulous.

Professor F smiled, warm as a hand on the shoulder. “It’s late. Skip the booze. Take something sweet. Let your heart settle.”

“But you just said…”

“I never said your glass was a cocktail.”

“…Fine.” A simple sleight of hand. She was used to people treating her like an underage girl. She sipped again, quiet as snowfall.

It was sweet, like a street-corner candy stall under yellow lamps. She took another pull.

“Doctor, with respect,” Professor F said, voice low as velvet. “At first you felt like driftwood—spent and letting the river take you. Not fighting for justice. Just standing here because interest pushed you.”

Pfft. Yekase almost sprayed, clapping a hand over her mouth like a lid on a boiling pot.

Professor F didn’t notice her turtle-neck flinch. “Then I learned I was wrong. You’re neither middle-aged nor a fence-sitter. It’s more like… I don’t read much fiction, but like an old hero who’d retreated to the hills, stepping out again after seeing the young carry the torch.”

That made Yekase want to hide under the table. Give her a week and Professor F could write The Chronicle of Yekase—was this how a proper squad leader does ideology work?

“I’m not that great…”

“You are.”

Yekase turned away, palm over her mouth, cheeks burning like fresh coal.

“…Ahem. Emerald Pool is something I have to end,” she said, voice steadying like a blade cooling in oil. “Or I can’t answer that unknown fighter. I can’t answer Ling Yi. I can’t answer myself.”

“Was the victim… special in some way?”

“No.” She slid the straw aside and drank from the rim like a mountain sip.

“Because he wasn’t special, he could be you, me, anyone. I couldn’t even save him. I don’t dare talk about changing the world. I just…”

She reached a hand toward Professor F, fingers pale as moonlight.

“I want to grip whatever these hands can reach.”

Professor F took it without a blink, grip sure as a clasped gauntlet.

“Then I’ll be the reach of your hands,” she said. “I’ll hope, from the bottom of my heart, that everyone who meets you, helps you, and trusts you carries this want farther—like a river carrying fire—farther than either of our lives.”

Yekase looked deep at the one called Omega F, a scientist both mysterious and keen-eyed, like night sky and clear spring in one.

She had never poked at her, not even with the obvious question: what is your tie to Omega, one of the Three Pillar Machine Gods?

And yet betrayal never crossed her mind. Professor F was that pure and that fierce, like an Omega Ray without impurities, shooting straight at a target, no matter how far it hung like a star.

For an Omega Ray that crossed the galaxy to Earth, what’s this little stretch of dark?

“By the way, a friend of mine’s dropping by tonight,” Professor F said, switching tracks like a turntable. “She’s an archaeologist. Member of a Sinister Organization.”

…Huh?

“You have a friend who’s in a Sinister Organization?”

Yekase felt like someone had just announced the world would end at 22:22 on 02/22/2022. Cat-head-in-the-cosmos.jpg.

Professor F waved both hands, flustered as wind chimes. “Not like that! On paper, yes. But they don’t do evil. More like an independent research institute…”

“Oh…” So, the type like Swordforging Manor or Eternal Green Pages.

Under the Huaxia Branch of Shadow Curtain International, starting a private company meant stacked taxes like falling bricks. Cheaper to hire a few bruisers and register a Sinister Organization—new risk of being declared war upon, sure, but E-grade outfits littered the ground like pebbles; harder to single one out.

Most were just lightly armed firms wearing the Sinister Organization signboard, paper tigers on the ledger. A year could pass without a single quarrel.

“But coming to the bar at this hour…”

Yekase checked her phone. 2:26 a.m.—a time for good kids to be nests of quiet breath.

“…Forget it, I’ve got no right to judge. Name and org?”

“Sandryon, of Eternal Green Pages.”

“I’m heading home.”

She set down the glass and rose like a shadow leaving a wall.

“—Oh my, sounds like I’m not welcome.”

…

The voice came from the ceiling, familiar as a tune. Yekase lifted her gaze, reluctant as a stone.

Tonight Sandryon wore a lavish pale-pink dress. Lace rippled from waist to hem like frost ferns. The vast skirt swallowed the roof beam under her, leaving only round-toed boots peeking out, as if she floated—dream poured into cloth.

“Where’s your workwear? You step outside and switch into lolita?”

“You don’t wander the streets in a lab coat, do you?”

“You two already knew each other?” Professor F blinked, delight and surprise like two small birds.

“Mm… kind of,” Yekase smiled stiffly. “We met in a dream.”

They’d been ordinary online friends until “those three days,” their first real sight of each other—so yes, a meeting in a dream.

That even the all-science, steel-straight Professor F knew Sandryon shook Yekase a little. It felt like wearing a lab coat to burn incense at a shrine. Wait—was that why Professor F had gotten a bit money-hungry lately?!

“It was indeed in a dream.” Sandryon straightened and drifted off the beam like a colored cloud, landing on the spare single sofa in their booth without a ripple.

“I’ve reviewed the backups from those two days. I came to confirm it. Heh, just as expected.”

She narrowed her eyes like a cat in sunlight, weighing Yekase as if for the first time.

“My crystal memory doesn’t err… Little sister Yekase, your talent’s rare as jade. Here’s a complete set of Ancient Alchemy notes, from entry to grandmaster, every word in my own hand. Most people dream of a glance. But for you, I can let it go cheap…”

Knowing her nature, Yekase didn’t flinch. “Name a price.”

“For the sake of sharing life and death, I’ll take a loss—just one million.”

“Drop dead.”

Sandryon, unbothered, took Yekase’s glass, found it empty, and slid it back with a mournful shake, like a bell at dusk.

“A pity. A pity indeed!”