Reunited, Chao Liangqun swelled to an unheard-of bulk, its crown kissing the ceiling, a little hill of jelly glistening like a frozen wave.

The bore hit 8,100 meters. I looked up through the entrance shaft, and the corridor stretched like an endless gullet. Not a single human light survived.

“So that’s it—the will of Flash Energy is ‘evolution.’ The Neptunian race carried ten millennia of memory, weathered dooms humans can’t imagine, yet fell to a backwater on the galactic rim, to sleep forever on Neptune—do you know why?”

Where are you even making that voice from? Frustration pricked Yekase; she wanted to ask that, but the words stuck like sap.

A talking blob of slime—the joke wrote itself, yet killed her research itch. Sarcasm dried to dust.

“The Neptunian Sovereign that fused with me said this:”

[We reached the limit of evolution. Our gene chain lies in tatters, unable to weave in any more possibility.]

“‘Possibility.’ What a fair, cruel word. A people abandoned by evolution… No matter how we change shape, no matter how we cross the stars, we’re only cheap fuel in human hands, pinned by gravity.”

“But now it’s different! Guided by gravity and Flash Energy, I—Chao Liangqun—will take a new step. We walk into the hundred-thousand-and-first year of Neptune!”

Chao Liangqun “saw” thousands of eyes below, a night sky of pupils burning cold.

He stood at a podium as always, addressing his employees, a captain on a steel deck before a low tide of faces.

Those dull, simple, rough savages were born to be led by him; if not him, someone else would leash them. Maybe they wouldn’t even get a living quarter.

Yes—like the Neptunian Sovereign, leading its faithful brood…

But not a single one of those eyes lowered as he wished. Deep inside each iris, wildfire gathered, banked and bright.

How dare they. How dare they bare fangs, refuse to sacrifice, refuse to block the invasion. Isn’t Emerald Pool their home, their harbor?

“Ah—ah…!”

The slime became a giant palm and swatted Yekase away, a wet thunderclap.

“Doctor!”

“I’m fine!”

She shouldn’t have been hit, but her body stalled for a heartbeat. She felt it—the Neptunian gown on her skin locked horns with the higher-kin pressure spilling off Chao Liangqun. The clash dragged her speed down.

As a shard of the Neptunian race, you’re resisting too—

Ling Yi stepped between Yekase and the wave. A window snapped open on her HUD, a crimson warning from the Blade Armor.

Heat and pressure kept climbing. The two not-quite-human beings could keep adapting like deep-sea fish, but the Blade Armor was mostly machine, and near its normal limits. To go deeper, it needed to unlock Flash Energy, and refit on the fly.

Last time that went berserk. It almost killed the Doctor.

But without new possibilities, they couldn’t even crack Chao Liangqun’s skin.

Ling Yi hesitated for a third of a second. Resolve hit; red-blue flame bloomed over her like twin lotus fires.

“Can’t endure the sieve of the environment, so you finally self-ignited… hm?”

Something felt off.

Under that two-toned blaze, corners of armor began to melt. But the red molten iron didn’t drip. It streamed along her under-suit, flowing back toward Ling Yi’s core like a river returning to the sea.

Yekase caught on. She pressed her back to the searing metal wall. Her hand slid into the gap at her waist. A phone kissed her palm.

6, 6, 6.

[Complete.]

“Show him—show them—what you’ve got, Flashblade Red!”

A silver veil unfolded like moonlight on water.

Luciferin burst through.

Ling Yi vaulted up, hanging before its chest.

The chest frame snapped backward, flipping inside-out. The old cockpit hid along the spine. The hatch yawned, not to a pilot seat Yekase used, but to a human-shaped recess.

A dual cockpit that flips front-to-back.

“Knew you had a trick waiting… You do love surprising me,” Yekase said with a helpless smile. People will kill you with brilliance; right now, in R&D, in leadership, even in flashes of inspiration, she lagged behind that woman in the shadows.

Luciferin caught Ling Yi with surgical precision. The hatch sealed like a steel eyelid.

Both arms rotated and stretched outward. The uniform red striping split: left arm red, right arm green, asymmetry like twin serpents.

The leg armor pushed wide and grew fleet. Their colors parted into yellow and blue, lightning over sea.

They matched the four base forms of the Blade Armor.

When the limbs locked their changes, circuits lit up along every line. Four metallic hues flared in particle sheen, kin to Flash Energy.

The mask-like helm hid the face. The twin ocular sensors flared blood-crimson, two comets in a steel skull.

“So this is… what piloting a mech feels like…”

Awe warmed first; then sensation rolled in. The melted Blade Armor had become connector and grease. Its plasticity and mind-conduction were so high she didn’t feel like a pilot. She felt like she had become the mech.

[Give it a name.]

“Eh? Isn’t it called Luciferin…?”

[New cockpit, new shell. New name.]

“Mm…”

Ling Yi stepped forward.

Red lightning cracked in her right hand, coalescing into the Sky Striker’s shape, a blade like a frozen bolt.

“When Professor F designed this mech at the start, the Doctor named it ‘Eden,’ right?”

[Ah. Yeah. It was a casual pick…]

“Then let’s call it—”

A blade of pure, unalloyed Flash Energy cut down the rushing Chao Liangqun from crown to root, a sunrise cleaving a storm.

“Useless, useless, useless! I’ll absorb your energy. I’ll eat you empty—”

The overlapping voices died like a strangled echo.

Its body did swallow the hit. But something it couldn’t parse bloomed at once.

Bubbles rose on that dark green skin, modest and plain. A string of small beads climbed from its belly to the surface, popping with the softest sighs.

“Edens Zero.”

Ling Yi’s voice rang over Chao Liangqun’s head, like a judge’s gavel falling.

He couldn’t understand. He gave thousands of employees jobs, kept them from starving. What crime did he commit?

“You don’t have to overthink ‘Eden,’” Yekase said, leaning on the wall like a banner in hot wind.

“I just like it.”

Then came an upward diagonal slash, clean as a crane’s wing.

Then a lunge, straight as a falling spear.

The blade buried in one side of Chao Liangqun spat red lightning. It dimmed. Its shape shivered. Continuous contact sped the absorption beyond normal.

But Ling Yi didn’t pull back. She opened her hand. She let the thing eat the blade whole.

Her tactic was simple.

Stuff Chao Liangqun until it burst.

Against something that absorbs, any fighter would think of this. With Edens Zero as the power well, Ling Yi finally dared to go all in.

Bubbles bred fast along the slime-sphere’s hide, bigger and bigger, a feverish pond in a summer storm.

It felt it—its body had begun to simmer.

A form that shrugged off direct stellar heat now self-ignited from a short, savage flood of Flash Energy.

This Infinite Power that no human had truly studied—what was its origin? How far could it go?

“The Doctor told me,”

“Flash Energy is born with the wave function, a force of evolution and possibility, a blade to cut a path to the future!”

Her fists gathered heat like twin suns. They drove straight into Chao Liangqun’s body, two meteors punching into a swamp.

Twin currents poured out from her pauldrons without asking permission, surged down the mech’s arms, and rammed into the slime.

“Endtime Twin Gauntlets!”

“U—uwaaaaaaa?!”

Too hot, too hot, too hot!

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be this.

It tried to flee, to pour into cracks in the floor, to hide in seams of the tunnel-boring machine, to digest the spill before it sloshed over. Give it time and it would eat all this Flash Energy, grow stronger, and come roaring back.

“The cruel side of evolution isn’t for us to obey. It’s for us humans to correct!”

Yekase burst from between Edens Zero’s legs like a swallow from a gate.

She gripped the Polaris Staff with both hands, dragging it behind her like a long blade. From the staff’s tip, along the fractured side of Nayuta’s broken edge, a cherry-hued arc of light slowly unfurled.

“Starbreaker—”

She had named the Polaris Staff’s passion-casting mode “Starforge.” The new derived mode, tuned for close-quarters after mounting Nayuta (invented half an hour ago), she called “Starbreaker.”

The light-blade grew longer than Yekase herself, locked its curve, then scaled up in measure.

Two meters. Three. Five.

It became a giant beam scythe, a weapon that wouldn’t look out of place in a mech’s hand.

Ling Yi lifted a foot. Yekase sprang onto her instep, borrowed the rise, and soared.

The guillotine-bright beam scythe fell with unstoppable weight, a moon cleaving a tide, onto Chao Liangqun’s crown.

It tried to dodge, but those fists driven deep held it fast. It couldn’t shed them.

“Witch-Hunt!”

You’re not even hacking a witch, Ling Yi found a heartbeat to gripe in her head.

Two fists and one scythe nailed Chao Liangqun to the floor. It thrashed, but the steel earth held like an anvil.

Thin tendrils uncoiled from Yekase’s cloak and sleeves, dozens of them, wrapping her arms and twining down the Polaris Staff’s shaft. They fed her strength like roots feeding a tree.

Light blazed to blindness. The roars had no human shape. Chao Liangqun’s body changed color, then dried, then boiled. It writhed on a metal floor ten thousand meters down, a floor over three hundred Celsius, like a fish on iron.

No no no no no! I am perfect! I won’t die, I refuse to die! Where’s the next me? The next me! If even one of me reaches that place—

“You won’t beat us.”

The explosion hit like a collapsing star. In the last instant before her mind went black, Ling Yi pulled Yekase tight against her chest.