Luzhixing’s two knives drooped like leaves after rain; relief uncoiled in her chest like a loosened bowstring.

“I told you. Daggers fit you.”

“That’s what you say to the hero who shows up at the cliff’s edge? I used to use daggers.”

“...”

“They flow with my hands. They match my rhythm. It’s just that...”

Yekase clenched a vibro-knife between her teeth. Her left hand hooked the right glove’s index finger and stretched it to the limit.

Then the blade kissed the seam and slit it open, crisp as moonlight on silk.

Irritation burned low, then steadied into resolve. “Daggers are too short. Too many things stay out of reach. Slitting a throat means nothing by itself. Pure destruction only swaps out whatever sits on your head. What I want is... a power that can protect.”

Her freed index finger pressed to the dagger’s flat, and she poured Flash Energy in like a river under ice.

It fused with the metal and fed it the idea of evolution.

In other words, to “forge iron.”

The dagger’s body glowed with a red ember. Steel stretched outward like a blade blooming, until it reached a one-handed sword’s length.

Only then did Yekase take it from her mouth.

One-handed sword was close, but not quite. Under the moon’s thin frost, a revolver-like cylinder sat where grip met guard. The blade itself was asymmetrical. From the cylinder’s side, a half-length barrel-like mechanism ran beneath scarlet tracery along the spine.

Luzhixing had heard of this shape.

“...Gunblade.”

“How did you...” Gu Xiangshi blinked awake from shock.

“The staff said you’d vanished. I figured you’d crossed paths with Luzhixing. I asked the Eternal Green Pages. Sure enough, a hidden base in the mountains. So I came. And I thought the whole way...”

“What?”

“What to name my Gunblade.”

Zheng Shu shouted, voice like a cracked gong, “How dare you look down on us! She’s just a brat! Don’t be scared. Get her!”

His secretary clones still carried over their living habits; the way Yekase wielded Infinite Power like water over stone stunned them. They stalled, loath to be first.

“Useless! All of you! I order you to attack!”

Only then did the clones shuffle forward, a reluctant tide.

Yekase planted the Polaris Staff in the blood-soaked soil, now soft like wet clay. She strode in with the Gunblade. One cut took a head; a trigger squeeze spat two rounds of long-stored Flash Energy. Three secretaries dropped almost in the same breath.

Her weakened arms couldn’t fully master the weight, so she let inertia lead. She moved as one with the Gunblade, weaving through the pack, dancing a duet of steel flashes and bullets.

“Don’t be afraid! She’s just a kid. Drain her stamina and we win!”

The line tickled her. Yekase snorted a laugh, bright as a spark.

“Drain my stamina... Which patch did you load?”

She gripped the Gunblade with both hands and swung a full circle. The shockwave shoved the clones back two steps—those who didn’t move lay down forever. She drove the blade into the ground beside the Polaris Staff.

“I feel you by my side!”

A vortex of intertwined silver and red roared skyward like a dragon’s coil.

“That’s just special effects! Break her stance!” Zheng Shu shrieked, arms windmilling.

A few clones believed him. They rushed in and thrust hands into the spiral. It scooped them up and flung them who-knew-where, like leaves into a typhoon.

Yekase knew they’d try to interrupt the transform. She let the vortex spin a few extra heartbeats on purpose. Sure enough, someone bit the hook. When the shimmer broke, her silhouette—changed in small, sharp ways—reappeared before Luzhixing and Gu Xiangshi.

“—You?!”

Luzhixing had already settled cross-legged, steady as a stone. She didn’t follow hero news. She asked offhand, “Who?”

“The culprit behind the recent spike in hero activity—Magical Girl Icarus! ...Huh?”

...But... wasn’t she smaller?

These months, every group had dumped stacks of reports. Not one found her real identity or base, but photos from every angle could be collaged into a 3D model. Gu Xiangshi had pored over them until her brain went numb. She was certain of one thing— Icarus should be a Magical Girl, not a pint-sized mascot.

Everything else matched, down to that “iron pole” she’d lugged for days, which lined up with the staff in the files.

Then there was only one tidy answer.

“Icarus’s little sister?”

“You’ve got quite an imagination.”

Yekase wrenched her two weapons free of the earth.

One staff, one blade.

She slung the Gunblade over her shoulder. The head of the Polaris Staff budded branches, then pointed across the crowd at Zheng Shu hiding behind his clones.

“Come!”

Zheng Shu flinched head to toe and shrank farther like a crab into its shell.

“...Boring.”

Puppets, yet they inherit the dead’s temper. A rule-bending class? These mystic types—impossible to parse.

“You two still able to run?”

“No problem.” Luzhixing had meditated only minutes. Her breath had steadied like a quiet pond. The cuts beneath her torn clothes had begun to knit.

Gu Xiangshi was worse off. She didn’t know Mind Energy breathing. Still, she stood and said, “No problem!”

“They’re going to escape! One person can’t hold us! Go kill the two in back—”

Yekase stepped back between them. The Polaris branches folded in. She held it crosswise like a bar.

“I asked if they could run. I didn’t say we would— Celestial Speech Parallel Passion Battle Continuous Levitation Spell!”

A deep hum, like a temple bell. Then nothing at ground level.

Zheng Shu looked up. The three of them hung off the staff like swallows on a wire, already fifty meters high. Yekase even waved.

“Still taunting...!”

He misread her. She’d seen a red dot streaking in from the city and had waved at it, that was all.

Either way, they were beyond his reach now, as distant as stars.

“For straight up, Levitation Spell beats Flight Spell. Joystick can’t walk a straight line like a keyboard,” Yekase said to the two hanging from either end.

Why explain tricks to two people who weren’t even friends? Maybe the inventor in her wanted to preen a little.

If there’s a future without fighting, going home to teach might be nice... lectures on Flash Energy and Alchemy, with the occasional machine-building lab... no, machinery is the main course.

The red dot ballooned fast.

It was Ling Yi in Kagari form, wrapped in a halo of red energy. She stopped dead in the air, no inertia, right in front of them.

“Supersonic—greetings!”

“...Same line?” Gu Xiangshi muttered through pain.

“That—well, the Doctor asked me to think of a cool entrance line before I left, so I came up with this. It sounded cool. I wanted to say it too...”

Ling Yi eyed the three of them hanging like dried fish and held it in as long as she could. Then, “The Buddy Trio?”

“Not quite friends,” Yekase said. She flipped and sat astride the staff, then pointed at the two slabs of cured meat on either end.

“Better than I expected. The enemy’s combat level is trash. We didn’t get to the point where we needed you to bail us out. But these two are wounded. Hanging here isn’t great. Grab one for me.”

“What about the ones below? There are a lot.”

“They’re just puppets made by the real enemy. Once they’ve got no use, their master will toss them. Ignore them.”

Squeezed between two heroes, Gu Xiangshi’s face went dark like a storm front.

“Flashblade Red is in Changyun too...”

What was with tonight? First a misunderstanding almost soured things with the strongest fighter in the underground circuit. Then she got knocked to her knees. Then a mob of small fry, the kind she usually swatted with one hand, hemmed her in...

And in the end, two heroes saved her?!

A dignified executive of Shadow Curtain International, the future mistress of the Huaxia Branch, the person every Sinister Organization across Huaxia would follow within ten years— rescued, without a word, by two people who should be doing hard time?

And now they were worried about her injuries?

Was she supposed to say thank you?

All of this traced back to one woman...

Gu Xiangshi glared at Yekase, who sat on the staff as casually as if on her living room couch, left leg swinging like a clock’s pendulum.

“I forgot to tell you something, Miss Gu.”

“...!”

What now? A threat? Money or power as leverage? An executive mixing with heroes—whatever the reason, if it got out—

“I watched the footage from the camera at the Silver Star Forge entrance. Your whole fight. Man... it was full-on fantastical. Not a style I can copy.”

“That’s it?”

Yekase looked down at her and smiled, cool as shade. “Mm. For cooperation’s sake, I decided not to hide anything from you until the rally ends. This isn’t an exception.”

“...Understood.”

She lowered her head. Her face sank into the shadow of her hair like a moon behind clouds.

Once Ling Yi carefully took Gu Xiangshi into her arms, Yekase conjured a Helen Disk. Luzhixing sat beside her, and they drifted off together.

Good. Just like that, the plan to save the footage, bundle it, and take it home to study with Lu Yao—their private combat habits, the most honest tells—slipped by in this warm, easy air.

Come on. Look who these two are. One’s a multi-time champion of the underground circuit. The other’s the young heir to Shadow Curtain International. They look bedraggled now only because they ran into each other. If Yekase had to fight them, even counting Luciferin, the win wasn’t certain.

And because of who they are, the odds she’ll have to fight them someday are sky-high.

No way she’d pass up a chance to observe how they really fight when no one’s watching.

...

For now, she let herself breathe in the rare quiet. Two fighters, one hero, and one person who didn’t fit either banner, sharing the air without bloodshed... If she hadn’t lived it, even Yekase wouldn’t have believed it.

“—Day three of the rally. This one night in Changyun has stretched like a long cloud indeed.”