Yekase gets marched into the execution chamber by two cadres, like a goat pushed into a cold pen under a gray sky.

They skipped her dinner yesterday and her lunch today, shabby cruelty that smells like a violation of Geneva, a drizzle that won’t spark her Flash Energy. Her body stays quiet, like stone under frost.

The room isn’t wide. A gallows rises in the center, a dead tree in lamplight. Around it, cameras already bloom like black eyes on walls. In minutes they’ll broadcast her execution across all of Huaxia, like storm sirens in every city.

Yekase flashes a V sign at the central lens, a tiny blade of joy under a hawk’s gaze.

“We aren’t live yet. Don’t waste your feelings,” Gu Xiangshi says, voice like a cool wind crossing steel.

“Oh. Call me when it starts,” she says, easy as sunlight on a window.

The cadre on her left slaps her, a flat thunder on skin. “Watch your mouth with the young master.”

“With my mouth,” she says, sweet as a fox under moonlight.

She eyes his classic villain mug and nearly laughs. It takes a tide’s restraint not to plant a knee where the sun doesn’t shine.

He cocks his hand for a second slap. Gu Xiangshi catches his wrist, a clamp like iron bark.

“You puff up her face and they’ll say we abuse prisoners,” Gu says, voice like a bell in a temple.

“Isn’t that perfect! Let them know what happens when they oppose us—”

“Uncle Gang,” Gu Xiangshi raises his tone a notch, a string drawn tight.

“…Yes.” The middle-aged cadre called Uncle Gang drops his hand, sulk like smoke.

Yekase smiles at him, spring light on snow.

“You’re still smiling!” Uncle Gang glares, eyes like flint.

“I can’t smile? I’m about to die and you won’t let me grin? In the stream I’ll bring Huaxia a smile,” she says, a lantern on a long night.

Uncle Gang breathes like a bellows, turns his face away, storm cloud tamped down.

Gu Xiangshi ignores him, strides to the back, flicks the cameras on—lights waking like fireflies—then returns and stands off to the side of the platform, a shadow at the riverbank.

“When that red lamp goes green, the national live feed begins. You get five minutes. After five, they’ll put you on the gallows,” he says, words clean as a blade.

Yekase nods, calm as lotus on water. “Five minutes is plenty. Tell your two uncivil subordinates not to interrupt my fiery speech.”

Uncle Gang and the other cadre try to force her to kneel. Her legs root like an old pine.

They kick the backs of her knees together. Nothing. She’s a cliff in a surf.

“What are you doing, giving me a massage?” she says, laughter like wind chimes.

“Kneel! You’re at death’s door and still this arrogant!”

“You can kowtow and beg me,” she says, a cat flicking its tail.

“You—!”

She just sits cross-legged, casual as a picnic on spring grass. Uncle Gang’s temple throbs like a drum.

The red lamp blinks twice. Then it turns green, a signal like dawn over fog.

“Ahem.” Yekase clears her throat, small thunder in a calm valley, and raises the V sign again toward the lens.

“Hello, everyone. I’m the Singing Wrecking Lady. Many of you wanted to see me. Many of you hate me to the bone. So I’m here, for everyone on this Huaxia earth.”

“Since I started, I’ve been asked a thousand times why I go this far. Aren’t combatants alive too? Don’t ordinary folks live, even if their lives are bitter? Who gave you the right to kick up a tide and drag them into war’s teeth?”

“Then I’ll ask you. Every combatant watching—listen up.”

“Have you ever, even once, felt fear of heroes who raise the banner?”

“Have you ever, even one night, noticed people wrung dry by exploitation?”

“Have you ever, even one heartbeat, imagined a world where justice still breathes?”

“If you’ve never feared, never seen, never imagined, then open those useless eyes and look around, like storm shutters thrown wide!”

“From today, things change. The heroes you thought fought alone have formed a front, a ridge line of fire. The ordinary people you thought would swallow everything are spitting back at you, like rain striking hot iron!”

“Bullets can’t snuff out lamps. Time stands at our shoulder. Look at the globe to come—watch it turn into our world.”

“And to the brave who’ve stepped into this wave, I have good news and a few words.”

“Good news: soon a red Infinite Power will enter public view. It’ll be your backbone, a mountain at your back, giving you strength enough to fight. Wait for it.”

“And here’s what I want to leave you.”

“There were no heroes. But the moment you decide to be one, you already are, like a candle that refuses the dark.”

She finishes and laughs again, bright as noon over water, like someone who finally set down a heavy pack and started planning a vacation.

“As for me,” she says, voice soft as dusk.

“Now I can say this with a clean heart:”

“I made a promise to my past, and who I am now is my answer to that day.”

…

…

[I made a promise to my past, and who I am now is my answer to that day.]

Shangjing City, Twin Towers City, Liudong City—every giant screen in every Huaxia city carries Yekase’s smile and words, sparks thrown across night highways.

“Damn, she really intends—” Even Lu Yao loses her cool. She stands from Peace Walker’s pilot seat, a wave rising in a steel bay.

Ling Yi’s Luciferin-plus-dragon combo build clicks into place, a puzzle lock in the mind. When it’s about mind-over-matter checks, she’s like someone who toggled god mode, a cheat code written in starlight. She’s become the mechanical dragon progenitor Balafaruth, named by Aurora herself, a thirty-meter class shadow, chasing true great dragons, looking freaking powerful, like a storm caged in iron.

She doesn’t know any draconic combat skills. She doesn’t know how to use four iron claws, six iron wings, and an iron bite to gain edge. She only breathes a Flash Energy plus Mind Energy mixed dragon-breath, a rose-magenta flame over snow. Maybe that’s plenty.

She’s above Shangjing now, iron wings sharp and beautiful, spraying that rose-magenta Infinite Power. To dodge Shadow Curtain International’s net, she hovers at twenty thousand meters, a hawk beside Lu Yao’s Peace Walker.

Jiang Bailu’s Coffee Moon leans too hard into defense. In this execution field full of knives, it’s a shield in a hailstorm. A thousand eyes lock that building; punching in with the White-Clad Ghost’s two fists is fantasy. So she stays aboard Ambition Divine Ship with Liu RuoYuan, a pair of lanterns on a dark deck.

And Hu Xiaolei, who never joined their ops, sits before the screen holding Yekase’s face. Her rough hands clutch Liu RuoYuan’s hand, knuckles white, like roots clutching earth. She says nothing, a quiet well.

“It’ll be okay. Trust her,” Liu RuoYuan whispers, a breeze on a fever.

Mom nods, but her grip stays iron. It hurts Liu RuoYuan, a pressure like winter ropes.

Yekase’s five-minute fiery speech ends on TV. The hour of execution steps closer, a tide rolling over sand.

The noose, a braided, knotted hemp snake, slips around her slender neck, a pale willow under frost.

…

…Uh, wait?

Can she… actually be hanged?

They once watched Yekase get swallowed—sorry—by the not-yet-tamed Rice Rice, whole upper body down the maw. Lu Yao and Ling Yi share the same flicker of doubt, a sparrow darting across thought.

She… seems able to evolve skin-breathing, like a seal under ice?

Even with the Japanese long drop that snaps the neck like a dry twig, her brain and spinal cord, living in separate neighborhoods, would probably find a way to reconnect, like vines across a wall. Shadow Curtain International chose slow strangulation to prolong suffering, a winter that won’t break.

“Slow strangulation,” ha.

The four who planned Save Private Yekase all day feel a hollow wave pass through them, a sudden empty harbor. And, though some won’t admit it, they feel a survivor’s relief, a spring wind after a storm.

Devices that mask Infinite Power can’t negate effects that run inside-out and never end. That’s an Ascender—the new humans fused with Infinite Power, a river in their bones. Their abilities spill at full strength in any weather.

“…So that’s it. She’s staging a noble death to pull the tides of feeling. If she bolts now, it blunts the impact of her words and may make people expect too much and lean on heroes,” Lu Yao says, voice like chalk drawing a line.

Jiang Bailu picks it up. “And if she shows she can’t be killed even by Shadow Curtain International, the public will throw the burden of overthrowing the Sinister Organization onto her shoulders. She won’t have time to push Flash Energy to the masses.”

“So she plans to fake her death and flee to Europe, letting the flame get smothered?” Ling Yi can’t accept it, thunder under a tight sky.

“This uprising is too rushed… The only group with anything like a long-war plan is Red of Resistance. The rest differ only by how long they can hold,” Liu RuoYuan says, pain like rain soaked into her coat.

—It’s rushed. How could it not be rushed?

From Yekase bringing back the Silver Star system,

From Shadow Curtain International wiping out Beast King Squadron,

From Professor F dying with the quarry,

From Fang Tang raising the banner in fury,

In a single month the skies flipped like pages. Which step did they take by choice, with time to prepare?

This crimson rush is just contradictions reaching a boil and venting—like Chen Sheng and Wu Guang in history. Righteousness alone doesn’t hand out easy victories, it’s a drum without a stick.

But it’s enough to wake most people, a bell in early dawn.

Jiang Bailu suddenly grasps another reason for the fake death. “She wants to trade the life and accumulated sway of ‘Wrecking Lady’ for the peaceful disbanding of the uprising…?”

That’s why she didn’t say “Yekase” in her intro. She spoke the title she never liked, a cloak she finally put on.

With the current death-match tempo, if those squads lose and get caught, their leaders will face a heavy fate, iron chains in deep water. Yekase means to become the biggest name on the wanted list, take all the blame, a lightning rod in a storm!

If those leaders are no longer leaders, but subordinates of the Wrecking Lady, penalties shift from criminal into civil—law like water re-channeled. That way they preserve the living strength, seed grain saved in clay jars, waiting in shadow for the next, better season.

“This reverse use of administrative law… classic doctor-grade thinking. She knew early she wouldn’t die on the platform,” Jiang Bailu sighs, breath like mist.

Or… she struck a deal with Gu Xiangshi?

Either way, they’re safe, a harbor after long waves.

This tide big enough to ink the history books comes fast and goes fast, a summer squall. It ends in a way still loud enough to echo. And as the four feel relief, regret, and awe, the base of Shadow Curtain International’s Huaxia Branch, that landmark called Huaxia Tower—

—BOOM!!

A gigantic pillar of interwoven silver and red lances through it, a spear of dawn and dusk. For the second time this week, the tower burns, a pyre against the sky.

A figure drops from the horizon, standing on a staff like an iron pipe, arms crossed, surveying the crater like a queen on a cliff. Dozens of hair-thin beams whirl around her, dragging afterimages like comet tails, and pop every incoming projectile in an eye-blink.

She stands unshaken in the heart of the blast, a rock in a black river.

Her red scarf dances like living flame, a banner in the storm.

“I’m Magical Girl Ivaris—I’m here to take someone.”