Yekase touched down like a leaf on still water.

No need to babysit the match; the threat had shrunk to a single, sharp thorn.

So she would pluck that last thorn.

“Doc, what if he spins up a horde of puppets again?” Ling Yi dropped behind her like a shadow cut from the night.

“He can’t—if daylight didn’t drain him dry, he wouldn’t lunge for a final gambit by night,” she said, cool as moonlight on steel.

Sneaking a lone researcher-puppet into the Eternal Green Pages base as bait was a paper tiger with no teeth; it never could lure them off.

Which meant his tank was running on fumes.

Ling Yi swept the dark with thermal, embers sketching the ruins; Yekase swept again with Infinite Force Perception, a lighthouse through fog. Only when nothing living or monstrous flickered within hundreds of meters did they shoulder open the secret lab’s heavy door like prying at glacier ice.

Silver Star Forge.

The ancient engine with that name slept in the lab’s depths like a buried star. Yekase was sure Li Erpao’s last chance to flip the board was coiled there too.

They stepped inside.

First sight: a colossal structure spearing the building’s heart, half bearing, half conduit; cables and pipes wrapped it like iron vines. Stairs and corridors bent around it, leaving an airy shaft so from anywhere you could look up and see its spine.

They leaned over the railing. The thing sat in a shaft without a bottom, not cave-dark but furnace-bright; the walls glowed molten red, the air shimmering like a mirage.

To Yekase, the machine blazed like a sun you couldn’t meet with naked eyes; pain needled sharp as ice, and she shuttered her Infinite Force Perception to dim the glare.

Before she closed it, she forced one last glance.

Inside that pillar, a crazed whirlpool of colors turned, slow as a grinding storm.

Mind Energy, Soul Power, Sorcery, Omega Ray, Flash Energy—and Spiral Force.

Under Spiral Force, they were fusing, like braided rivers becoming one flood.

“…Ugh!” She flinched, snow-bright pain lancing her eyes.

“You okay, Doc?” Ling Yi asked, voice quick as wind.

“I’m fine,” Yekase said, glass-calm, and they ran down the spiral stairs into the lab’s gut. Some bad memory snagged Ling Yi; she hugged the wall like a stray in rain, then surged ahead.

At the bottom of the shaft, they found Li Erpao.

He hunched over the pillar’s base console, pecking like a rat at a trap; two sets of boots closed in, and his hands froze like ice.

He turned, hinge-grim.

He saw Yekase with the Gunblade slung on her shoulder, and Ling Yi with the Sky Striker held like a katana by her cheek.

Those two, plus the lab-coated woman who tore the mask off the Liang Bo puppet at the base—three reinforcements from Eternal Green Pages had ground his plans to dust.

“Your power has three settings.”

She didn’t wait for his breath; she started cutting with words, a razor across armor.

She wasn’t here to redeem him, and she never cared about motives; her goal was simple, to make him feel his plates peeled off, one by one, until his nerve snapped.

People say don’t do to others what you hate. What if someone did this to Yekase?

Please—she’d hand them a catalog of her junky tricks long enough to read till dusk.

“First gear: weakest control, flimsiest build, but it floods the field for free,” she said, each word a tap of a chisel. “The daytime chaos was that, and last night’s secretary too.”

“Second gear: balanced across the board. Two or three at once, split across places. Every contestant-puppet but the secretary was that kind.”

“Third gear: top tier. It only breaks to lethal human damage, and you can jack in to pilot it remotely. Daytime Li Dapao and nighttime Liang Bo were that class.”

Li Erpao didn’t answer. His face was corpse-still; those bloodshot, hollow eyes pinned Yekase like nails.

“But there’s one thing I haven’t figured out…”

Yekase bled a trickle of Flash Energy into the Gunblade and snapped a shot. A red spark popped on the console’s rim, and his reaching fingertip flinched back like a singed moth.

“Are you Li Dapao—or Li Erpao?”

“…”

“At this point, hiding that kind of info is pointless, right? Don’t get me wrong, whether you speak or not is smoke to me. I just want the whole picture.”

“Yes. I have an older brother,” Li Erpao said, voice like damp ash.

“He did everything better than me. Grades at school, pull in the organization, even little things like shooting and driving…! I lived in his shadow. Can you even understand that?” He hurled the words like stones.

“I can’t, because I’m on the genius side,” Yekase said, blunt as a hammer.

…That killed the mood, genius, the thought slid through Ling Yi like a cold draft. She shot Yekase a glare, visor dull as slate; Yekase didn’t look.

“But my brother cared for me. He protected me,” Li Erpao went on, drowning in memory. “So I hated him on the surface, and loved him in my bones…”

“How about you check into a psych ward first? This place is dangerous. Don’t pick now to break,” Yekase said, tongue honed like a blade.

Different people earned different weather.

This man had aimed his blade at team members and hotel staff who weren’t even fighters. Whatever his aim or sob story, the moment he chose that, the bridge between him and Yekase burned.

She still let him speak to see what trick he’d wring from the husk—and because she had a selfish itch. She wanted to see whether he’d come here just to smash things, or if he really had his own take on mixing Infinite Power.

“So I proposed to my brother we’d use this rally to kill that pampered Shadow Curtain International heiress, clean and quiet!”

“That… doesn’t connect to what you just said,” Yekase deadpanned, flat as slate.

“Maybe he means proving himself…” Ling Yi breathed by her ear like a moth’s wing.

“But he already killed his brother and turned him into a puppet. Who’s he proving it to?” her whisper cut thin as thread.

“Uh…”

Ling Yi had no answer. She asked him straight, arrow-clean: “Why?”

“My brother watches from the sky. He’ll see.”

…Uh-oh, a pure idealist, the thought grumbled like a low cloud.

“That woman’s ability was tricky, so I built this,” he said, eyes fever-bright. “Turn the whole hotel into cannon fodder. She’ll isolate the place out of a ruler’s duty. While she struggles with low-grade puppets, she’ll be weakest.”

“But this plan had a hole,” Yekase picked up, smooth as a hand over silk, as if she’d drafted it. “After Gu Xiangshi throws up quarantine, no one inside gets out, no one outside gets in. Even if you pin her with civilians, you can’t land a killing blow; if you wait inside to get quarantined with her, it won’t be quiet.”

“So only one path remained,” she said, a narrow bridge over a gorge. “Use your Pale Knight. After the hotel’s quarantined away, you create a third-gear puppet inside. It has to be strong enough to end the fight. And for you, the strongest person is…”

Ling Yi froze, the thought snagging like barbed wire.

“Your brother, Li Dapao. You told him: to kill Gu Xiangshi, I need to borrow your head.”

“…”

“And because he loved you, he agreed.”

Clang!

The Sky Striker slipped from Ling Yi’s hand; she scrambled to snatch it back, breath a ragged gust.

Li Erpao just stood there.

Anger, madness, hysteria swirled in his eyes… and a cold seam of loneliness.

“Right. My brother’s puppet is gone. He’ll never come back. Even if I pull it off, he can’t see it.”

Then he turned and climbed onto the console, hand over foot like a desperate animal.

Yekase snapped the Gunblade up and fired.

Thup.

The energy round thudded into his back, a dull spark in meat. Shen Shanshan had said Yekase was born to shoot—the Gunblade had only iron sights, yet she hit him clean.

His body spasmed, arms flung wide, and he pitched forward—

Right into the Silver Star Forge.

That engine from a far age, a whirl of five colors, an endless spiral, churning six shards of truth that never unified, mixing them without end.

“Brother, let us be one! I feel your iron will. I know your resolve!”

Then the flood swallowed him whole.

“Dead?” Ling Yi asked, voice small as a pin.

“No.” Yekase fired a few more times into the forge’s mouth, sparks like fireflies, then holstered the Gunblade. “He was going to die, but you jinxed it. We need to go—now.”

Her body was almost pure Flash Energy; even with Infinite Force Perception shut, she felt a faint tug like tide. Inside that forge, Li Erpao—

“He turned himself into one last puppet before we came in!”

“What?! What’s the point of that?!” Ling Yi snapped into Gale, scooped Yekase, who hadn’t had time to chant Celestial Speech, and shot upward like a gust.

“Puppets are made of Sorcery. Toss one into the forge and it won’t vaporize like a normal body—it’ll blend. And a superpower is a personal circuit; feed any Infinite Power into it, you get the same output, which is why it looks like magic. He plans to use all the Infinite Power in that forge as material, to cast Pale Knight one last time.”

“Can you even do that?!”

“I don’t know—and he probably doesn’t either!”

One misstep in a stunt like this flattens a whole mountain; only a dead man walking like Li Erpao would dare a cornered leap like this.

They burst through the lab doors and tumbled onto the ground like dice.

Yekase pushed up on both arms, rising from soil still wet with last night’s blood, and felt the tremor under her palms growing like a drum.

He… seems to have… done it, the thought dropped like a pebble into a well.

Is this where I say congratulations? As an Infinite Power researcher, Yekase almost meant it.

They looked back like moths to a flame.

The whole lab bucked; walls cracked and fell; a silver-blue torrent speared from the roof into the sky, and night burned white as day.

Li Erpao’s voice boomed from the pillar of light, stripped of human grain:

[—Overlay me and my brother. Weave a net of layered light. O surging Infinite Power, reshape my body!]