The three slipped past the useless gate and burst into the administrative sector like knives through wet paper.

In Yekase’s head, this place should’ve been bristling with guns, a hedgehog of defenses. At the very least, it shouldn’t have let them stroll in. Instead—

—instead, they strolled in.

No containers here. The corridor was so wide it made them feel toy-sized, a fish-eye tunnel of polished walls and spotless floor, nothing else in sight.

“What’s going on? No one?”

The eerie emptiness put a weight on Ling Yi’s chest. Her feet didn’t want to move.

“Lu Yao, got a drone?” Yekase asked without looking up.

Lu Yao shook her head.

Good thing she’d prepped. Yekase reached into the transport crate and fished out a little iron bird, then sent it skimming down the hall like a swift on a breeze.

“…Hmm?”

Lu Yao made a skeptical nasal sound.

“Wait, you’re misunderstanding!” Yekase rushed out. “The one I gave you really had no tracker, no camera, no mic! This one I modded just for this op!”

If a lie gets exposed, fine. But getting doubted when she’s finally telling the truth? That stung like salt on a cut.

Crying wolf, karma dogs you. With her habit of talking nonsense, she should’ve hit overdraft years ago…

Her head wandered, but the staff under her stayed steady. Flight Spell beat the Levitation Spell for a reason: it matched how people imagine flying. The spell handled the fiddly bits, like automatic versus stick shift, a breeze to use.

She’d also bolted new hardware onto the Polaris Staff, a brace to smooth her control. Now she could do needle-threading maneuvers. Vectoring with Levitation Spell. Long, complex patterns, as clean as calligraphy—

Zero “Mechanist” cred? Not quite. The assist system was absolutely Infinite Power machinery. Which made her a mechanist after all.

“Got something!”

Ling Yi’s shout snapped her back. Yekase looked ahead.

At the end of the long hall sat a not-so-large room. On its far side, another big door stood like a shut eye.

A gate before the gate.

This “administrative sector” didn’t look like any admin sector. It looked like the corridor before a final boss.

And in a place like that, there would always be—

—a man, middle-aged gone gray, stood in the room.

Suit on. A metallic sphere cradled in his arms. Head bowed, lost in thought. Broken machine parts littered the floor like fallen scales. A fight had just chewed through here.

“So you finally came… thugs who preach freedom—”

Two grenades answered him.

Lu Yao and Yekase moved as one. Lu Yao tossed an RGB33 she’d been palming, and Yekase yanked a Black Spider from the crate and snapped it forward.

Boom. Boom.

Twin blasts chained together swallowed the old man in a dirty blossom of smoke. Yekase instinctively grabbed for the dive kit he’d set up—then remembered the old buddy was dead. She curled her lip and slid it onto the head rail of the Polaris Staff.

At least it could push a bit more airflow.

The murk peeled back, slow as a curtain.

The old man lay crumpled, a rag wrung dry. Skin and meat all torn, no whole patch left. No breath.

“Huh? That’s it?”

The RGB33 was a brute-force legend, famous for raw payload. Yekase’s modded Black Spider was the kind that got you hauled into tribunals on foreign battlefields. With both thrown before he even finished his villain line, whatever trump he had died with him, buried with his combatants.

“Good. Move.”

“You two scare me…” Ling Yi stared at the body and let out a long, queasy “ew.”

Yekase shrugged it off. “Hit first when it’s the enemy. Why listen to tough talk? He won’t commit suicide after his speech. So why listen?”

Lu Yao was the silent-mean type. She grunted agreement.

Still… that old man felt like a basic soldier at best. Even a small-time cadre shouldn’t go out from two grenades, right? He should’ve at least twitched—

“Doctor, look!”

Ling Yi raised her Sky Striker and pointed at the thing that had rolled from the corpse.

The iron sphere he’d been hugging.

Yekase opened her Infinite Power sight and swept it. Surprise pricked her skin—no damage at all. In fact, an energy pattern like a boot sequence was flaring to life.

So that’s it—when the grenades went off, the old man wrapped the sphere tight with his own body and didn’t shield himself. That’s why he died so fast.

“—Watch the sphere!”

In Yekase’s view, the energy ballooned, bright as a sun you couldn’t stare at.

Going to explode?! No—no, the way it’s stacking—

“Drawing its own… SCV array?!”

That alchemy array from the symposium! The presenter was—damn it, can’t recall!

In a blink, the thing flared a vivid green. It slipped its spherical skin, swelling like a sponge soaked to bursting, growing taller than a person, bulging into a soft, irregular mass.

“Lu Yao, fall back! That thing might be hot on radiation. I got it!”

You’re flesh and blood too, Lu Yao thought—then saw Yekase trace a graceful arc through the air. She flipped like a hook hung upside down and scooped the swelling lump into her arms.

“How do I stop the reaction?!” Yekase yelled.

“You don’t know?!” Ling Yi yelled back.

“Then I’m popping a skill drain! Light up, Nightlight Torch!”

Invisible ripples rolled out. Ling Yi’s heart skipped hard, and her Blade Armor turned to lead. She dropped to one knee like a knight hammered down.

Lu Yao’s spider tank died on the spot. Guns she’d prepped in the cockpit broke into blue-white cubes and fizzled out.

The Flash Energy fused into Yekase stayed, the source of her power untouched. Magic wasn’t so lucky. With Flight Spell gone, gravity took her back. She smacked the wall and slid down like a dropped banner.

But the sphere—no, not a sphere anymore—the green unknown writhed in Yekase’s arms like a living thing, a frantic, slick muscle.

“Ugh! That’s gross!”

Point-blank radiation should’ve fogged her mind and rotted her skin. Instead, she spat a mouthful of dark blood, and her evolution kicked in like a storm catching fire.

Her skin rebounded, pale and smooth.

The edges of her sailor uniform singed, a black tide trying to spread—then froze into small islands, unable to advance.

Failing to break free, the thing changed tactics. It swelled again, boxing her head and most of her torso in a soft, reeking coffin. Only a pair of black-stockinged short legs stuck out, kicking the air like a metronome gone mad.

Pinned by the Blade Armor’s sudden weight, Ling Yi still knelt, struggling to rise. Lu Yao had seen Yekase cough blood. Pragmatic as ever, she knew normal bodies couldn’t tank radiation raw. She pulled a Glock, angled for a line that wouldn’t hit Yekase, and put two rounds into the green mass.

Thup. Thup.

The bullets sank with a damp, muffled sound, fading into the meat without harm.

That only provoked it. Seven or eight thin tendrils split off the main body, snaking around Yekase’s thrashing legs like wet ropes.

…Wait. Her whole head’s been bagged for over a minute, and she never stopped struggling. Is it breathable in there?

Of course not. The green gel had already invaded her nostrils and ears, then surged up her throat into her mouth. Only her clamped-shut eyes kept it from storming the seven orifices.

And then—something impossible flickered alive inside her.

Under catalytic stress, her Flash Energy’s self-renewal went wild. In short, she evolved.

Is breathing really that inconvenient? If mouth and nose are blocked, then breathe with skin.

Right now, she was doing gas exchange with the capillaries under the skin of her legs. A secret art born in crisis.

She’d been kicking that hard for a reason: the more her legs worked, the easier it was to “breathe,” like panting mid-sprint.

But once those legs got bound, things turned sour.

Thankfully, after a minute of wrestling, the thing misread her as a creature that didn’t need air. It gave up on smothering.

It grabbed her by the legs and stretched its soft body, hoisting her upside down like a lantern.

“Doctor?!”

“I’m fine—don’t come—!”

“You’re actually fine?!”

From her inverted vantage, Yekase checked Ling Yi and Lu Yao. Relief loosened her chest. Good. Nightlight Torch had pinned the radiation in a tiny circle. It hadn’t licked them.

But the drain cut both ways. They were safe, yet almost useless, stuck watching.

The unknown whipped Yekase through the empty room, a child twirling a toy.

“Waaah—!”

While hand-stripping armor to shed weight, Ling Yi watched it play with the Doctor. Panic and anger should’ve owned her. Yet her gaze snagged, helplessly, on a certain place… the matte-black wrap, the curve it traced, a secret line—

“…pantyhose…”

“When the beam’s crooked, the rafters follow,” Lu Yao deadpanned.

She grabbed the spare single-use rocket from the spider tank and aimed at the thick trunk anchored to the floor.

The rocket trailed fire and hit the root. The blast tore a gaping mouth in the mass. The tendrils holding Yekase slackened.

Yekase spun and crashed to the floor.

“Ow—my butt—ow? Not that bad.”