If the City of Ivalice was a giant beast built from steel cells called blocks, then the crossing pipes and hollow vents were the warm sea cradling its organs.

Jiang Bailu dropped straight through that hollow, her lab coat snapping like a white banner in a storm.

Storefronts, decks, galleries, and stairs rushed past like shoals of fish; streets that shouldn’t meet braided together, and structures that shouldn’t exist simply did, like a zipped archive crammed tight, like a kid’s wild box of blocks, and it tugged up the memory of that unseen underground city of the Emerald Pool.

Hovering platforms sailed by carrying screams like gulls on wind; seven had whooshed past already.

She held her general position with a flat force field like a raft on tide, and used thin filament fields to fold an elbow, tuck a knee, tilt her head, slipping past obstacles like a reed bending in current—keeping to a creed as spare as winter: if the world flows, I flow.

From outside—an observer’s eye—her body kinked at impossible angles, past ninety degrees like rubber blown thin, then snapped back the next instant as if nothing had happened; no blood, not even a breath of sound.

From her own skin inward, those parts had never moved at all, as quiet as a stone beneath water.

The distance closed, like a hawk stooping on a rabbit.

The mysterious thing that had ricocheted from ledge to gantry, falling at a ridiculous speed, was a squat, pudgy, spherical robot, like a cannonball with a heartbeat.

Ivalice’s police had eaten a few obstacles and fallen back like leaves in a rapid; Jiang Bailu only had to close in, close in a touch more, bring the robot into Coffee Moon’s range, and she could set a force-field trap beneath it that flipped its direction like a weathervane in a gale.

It would boomerang like a moth to flame, turn on a pin, and dive into her arms.

…Huh?

Just as she was about to finish it, the shaft below narrowed like a throat clamping shut.

The blocks on both sides bulged, like muscle swelling—no, the left block was moving, a glacier grinding its track; the moving block left no walkway, and waiting it out was snail-slow against her fall.

The little robot scraped through a gap not even twenty centimeters wide, wriggling like a bead through fingers.

What now?

Deflection couldn’t shrink her volume; twenty centimeters wouldn’t take her even sideways; at this speed, one scrape meant meat and red mist, like a peach into a grater.

Bailu-jie!

Ling Yi’s voice rang down like a bell; she’d chased them from above.

Jiang Bailu glanced back; Ling Yi wore a knight-styled ZEROS suit like a silver carapace, four thrusters on her back spitting red-blue flame like twin comets.

“It’s too narrow ahead, try a detour—”

“No detours!”

Ling Yi shouted like a spark across dry grass, dove past her, then reached both hands toward the facing blocks.

“You’re going to wreck a block? We can’t afford that!”

“Watch. Flash Energy does more than you think!”

Iron-red light bloom from her gauntlets like sunrise on steel; her palms met the block’s shell.

Metal that should’ve been unyielding melted like butter on a hot knife; her hands pressed dimples inward, brute-widening the tight throat by half, like a birth canal opening under pressure.

That’s still damage, right? Even if you don’t blow it up, you’re denting their shell into a potato; someone’s gotta fix that, like patching a cracked bell.

But then, something impossible rippled inside the metal like breath through a lung.

After Ling Yi and Jiang Bailu slipped through, the mashed metal swelled and smoothed like soft tissue knitting, slowly blooming back to its original shape.

“Th—this is—”

Flash Energy’s metal contamination, the very trick her modded Gauntlet had once used, like rust that obeys a whisper.

Armor helped, sure, but she’d pinched twisted steel back to factory-perfect, not a hair off; that was control like a calligrapher’s last stroke.

“Looks like the bottom’s close. Someone’s waiting,” Ling Yi said, voice cool as night rain.

“Already?”

Jiang Bailu looked down; a floor of metal spread like still water—no more downward paths.

Two suspicious figures stood on that mirror-bright plate: one in a cloak plastered with graffiti stickers like fallen leaves, one in a weird motorcycle helmet like an insect’s head. They faced the falling robot and held out their arms like goalkeepers ready to take it on the chest.

That was a solid iron lump that had clanged its way down, a bell with no hollow; Ling Yi’s skull had only stung for a while thanks to Mind Energy’s grace, and these two wanted to greet it with face and ribs?

One glance, and Jiang Bailu had her verdict, cold as a snap line.

Not residents—their style was too soft, like silk in a forge.

All the way down, every Ivalice local she saw could be summed by one word, “craftsman,” or “mechanic,” two faces of one coin—tinkering with ugly, honest structures, not caring about face, hard as the machines in their hands.

But these two—no tool belts on their hips, not even the kind Jiang Bailu herself would habitually wear, like a farmer without a sickle.

“Got it!”

Coffee Moon’s field had no projectile, like a shadow that needed no arrow; point and it landed. The falling robot flipped a perfect 180 midair, its pent-up gravity turning to upward speed like a spring unbound, and Jiang Bailu caught it clean in her arms.

“Reinforcements?”

The helmeted man rasped like sand on tin, and he threw up a wall of fire like a crimson curtain sweeping the stage.

A moment later, a standard square window opened in the moving fire, neat as a paper cut; Jiang Bailu dropped through unharmed, remembered to call Levitation Spell just before the floor, and floated down like a feather.

“You’re not locals, are you? That robot… it’s your target?”

Ling Yi, behind her, simply cleaved the fire wall like a wave split by a prow, then trimmed thrust and hovered beside Jiang like a hawk over a field.

Two against two, like stones set on a Go board.

Ling Yi took a breath and read the ground. This was Ivalice’s underside—cleaner than the scrap sea she’d imagined, but only by a margin; garbage lay everywhere like driftwood from above. There was space to plant your feet, but relax for a heartbeat and you’d step on trouble.

The cloak rasped like steel on steel. “Our target—has nothing to do with you!”

He drew a long, twisted iron rod like a thorn; scrap around them trembled, then lifted like a school of fish and wrapped the rod, becoming a junkyard maul the size of a coffin.

“Wow… a full tetanus platter,” Jiang Bailu breathed, a cat seeing a bath.

“I’ll take Hammer Bro,” Ling Yi said, voice steady as an anvil.

“Good.”

An attack face that wide was bad for Coffee Moon; one brush on the body and she’d be paste. The helmeted one looked like a mage, so that lane had play, like ice under blade.

…Even if it didn’t, she’d already secretly pinged Yekase on the way, like tapping a glass twice.

Ling Yi surged first, and tangled with the cloaked brute like thunder meeting rock.

Steel struck steel and threw sparks like fireflies; in a few head-on clashes she pushed Flash Energy into the maul, chewed a big bite out, then watched it refill with fresh scrap like a scab. She could crush the cudgel and knead it flat, but junk was still junk; shape it pretty, it stayed trash.

Still, no one’s stamina is infinite; the fight became a contest of bottomless wells, like two wrestlers locked at the waist.

“Still got time to watch them?”

The helmeted man’s voice slid in from Jiang Bailu’s front-left like a knife from shadow; her focus snapped back, and Coffee Moon threw a savage punch toward the sound like a hammer on a gong.

He collapsed under it, a low dip like a wave under a cliff.

This one had drilled his footwork; that’s why he chose to close, a viper to the wrist.

The white-clad ghost was a form of deflection made flesh; in theory it had no inertia, no reflex, like moonlight on a blade, but the one steering it was human. Born from her image of “someone who protects me,” Coffee Moon stayed bound to a human frame, a knight cut from her heart.

Unless—she could break her own subconscious, like ice breaking in spring.

That wasn’t a one-night revelation, and never something a battlefield epiphany could buy, like asking bamboo to flower.

The helmeted man slipped past every punch and pasted to her side with jiu-jitsu softness, like moss on stone.

At this range—no good; they were chest to chest, and a field couldn’t rewrite his actual position, like wind failing to move a mountain.

Thump.

“Ungh!”

A huge force slammed into her forearm, hurling her back like a kite cut loose; the helmeted man crawled after her along the floor like a cold snake, never giving breath a chance.

Inch force.

Power born in a distance too short to track, a thunder with no flash, which meant no “trajectory” for Coffee Moon to seize, like a trap with no shadow.

Only then did she see her flaw, twin to that Mirror King of Zhongshan’s, like faces in one mirror.

Coffee Moon’s punches were fearsome, but a miss was empty air, a tiger biting wind.

Deflection was ironclad, but if she couldn’t see a path, she couldn’t set a field, like a blind sculptor with perfect clay.

Her daze cost her; the peeping viper’s shoulder pressed her belly, gentle as a lift, and a second upward strike arrived as quiet as dew.

Jiang Bailu flew again like a split sack; she barely kept hold of the robot, cinched her direction with a field, and hopped to a higher perch to buy space like a cat to a shelf.

“Kh…”

A sweetness rose in her throat like bad fruit; she spat and saw saliva laced with red, a petal in water.

She drew a long breath, fog in winter lungs, and felt lost.

Why am I fighting?

Why am I brawling on day one here, like a traveler stumbling into a storm?

We’ve got the robot; I could just fly and go, like a crane leaving a pond.

Yekase’s almost here. Yekase will end this easily. Yekase will—

Levitation Spell.

She gave the inert sphere a clean push, firing it straight up like a flare.

“I didn’t want to show this so soon…”

Yesterday’s fresh trump card, the biggest hope she’d pinned like a talisman to her chest.

She watched the helmeted man arrow toward her along a crooked path like a swallow, and clenched her left fist. On her index finger sat the terminal to the world’s third transporter box that Yekase had given her long ago, a plain iron ring like a cold moon.

She steadied it with her right hand, opened the transport channel like a lock, then twisted ninety degrees like turning a key.

A slender blade, long prepared inside the ring, peeked out and kissed the base of her index finger, cutting a shallow, fine line like a paper cut.

The helmeted man landed on her platform and came at her along a ridiculous curve, a sickle in grass.

Jiang Bailu ignored him and lifted her hand to her lips, licking the cut like a reflex after a kitchen nick.

With that small movement, her aura flipped like day to dusk.

“…?”

Her eyes, dark as an ink pond, flushed crimson in an instant, twin embers under ice.

Vampire?

He’d seen vampires, and this still shocked him like thunder without rain. Vampires drank life from others; the True Ancestors could master the hunger, but none he’d seen ever drank themselves.

Second Dilution.

Jiang Bailu let out a long breath like steam.

“Serial dilution, like in lab assays—thin it enough, and it won’t read as vampire bloodline. Turn my own blood into a trigger. Yekase and I tested till three a.m.”

“That power’s still incomplete…” the helmeted man hissed, a wind under a door.

“Enough.”

Power-ups, bloodline magic—none of that mattered, like banners in fog.

All she needed was vitality.

The vigor that heals wounds and age, that drives life forward like spring through a frozen field—nothing else.

“Come on—round two.”

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