The phrase “memetic contamination” hit Ling Yi like a bucket of cold well water. She went quiet, shadowing Yekase all the way until a messenger from Labyrinth City took Charlotte home, and never said another word.

Only when a far corner of the Krasus Platform held just the two of them did Ling Yi clutch Yekase’s arm, nerves fluttering like a sparrow in spring. “I—I won’t fall in love with dragon-kind, right?”

“...That’s the angle you’re worried about?”

Well, that was important too. A pebble in the shoe still rubs skin raw.

“But first, we fix your current state—like a rabbit in mating season.” Yekase pinched one of Ling Yi’s ears and twisted until she yowled like a kettle boiling over.

When they first met, Ling Yi had been about five centimeters taller than Yekase. A long half-year later, an honest-to-goodness eighteen-year-old bursting with Mind Energy kept growing like a vine after rain, and finally broke the one-seventy mark.

And Yekase—supposedly in a brand-new teenage body—was in a second puberty unprecedented under heaven. Yet she hadn’t grown even a centimeter. How was that fair? Genes drawing lots in the dark?

Luckily she wore round-toed heels, borrowed height like a walking cane. That kept the gap under five centimeters, and let her twist Ling Yi’s ear at a not-too-strained angle.

“Dragons are Longlifers,” Yekase said, brows knitting like thunderclouds. “Low need to reproduce, yet they love taking human form to fool around. I thought it was just randy dragons chasing thrills. Didn’t expect it to be baked into the concept itself.”

“Eh.”

“And didn’t you turn into a mechanical dragon? In theory you shouldn’t have any baseline drives at all.”

“Eh eh eh.”

“...Or is it…”

Her real expression hid behind a doll’s flawless face, a silicone smile smooth as a mask. In Ling Yi’s eyes it became an uncanny-valley pressure, like cold glass between them.

“...Or are you blaming it on a drunken mood and this memetic contamination excuse, just venting bottled-up desire?”

“N-no no no no no!”

Five nos in a row. Ling Yi forgot the ear being twisted red and shook her head like a rattle-drum.

That reaction said enough. Yekase sighed and let the obvious truth drift away like smoke she refused to chase. She wasn’t a detective. Useless truths weren’t worth putting on the scale.

“...You’re at that age, anyway.”

“What about you, Doctor?” Ling Yi seized a chance to counter, like a rook breaking out of a cramped file. “What were you doing at eighteen?”

“Busy fighting aliens.”

“Uh.”

Right. The One-Year War.

“B-but didn’t you date that year? Your tender first love?”

“……”

Yekase fell silent. Her fingers unconsciously relaxed, letting go of Ling Yi’s ear.

Ling Yi feared she’d struck a nerve, a raw place no bandage could cover. The mask hid the face; was it sorrow under there, or anger? Better apologize—

“...Let me tell you about back then.”

Yekase folded over the railing like a reed in wind.

She stared out from the Krasus Platform at the wide fields of France. Evening’s gold lay over the hills like warm straw. This country, sheltered by the World Tree, had never chased industry hard; the distance held patchwork farms and slow streams.

“Ivaris was British. At seventeen she left home for Huaxia. She hit the One-Year War head-on, signed up for the third phase of the Magical Girl program, and became an ace of the Twenty Second Squad. She never said her family name. Later she whispered it to me—Windsor.”

“That sounds familiar... wait, is it—”

“It’s exactly that is-it.”

Yekase braced both arms on the railing’s edge, a diver at a cold riverbank.

“In August, the last first-gen Magical Girl—Magical Girl V3—faced an unexpected wave of exogens. She fought to cover the others. She died.”

“That night, Ivaris came to me. She demanded to know why V3 had no emergency eject device. There was only one left for the entire Twenty Second. I chose to give it to Ivaris. Because she was the long-expected Phase Three. Her life weighed heavier on the scale.”

“She grabbed my shoulders in Logistics and shoved me against the window. Tears and snot smeared everywhere. Then she puked—right on me. It soaked my clothes. I shook like I was standing in icy rain.”

“When the crying and puking ended, sour spit still at the corner of her mouth, she smiled and said:

‘Let’s date. I’m not dying to some alien without ever having been in love.’”

“So we dated.”

“But to this day, I don’t know where ‘romance’ ends and war-bond begins. I still don’t know... whether I liked her.”

Her voice went low, like a kettle on a low flame. Ling Yi leaned closer, catching the tremor she was trying to swallow.

Yekase bowed her head and covered face and brow with both hands. The mask that hid her expression gave her courage, like shade that lets a seed crack and show a fragile green.

“We made a promise... and I lost them. I lost them.”

...

...

Ling Yi listened through the winter of Yekase’s story. For someone who prided herself on high EQ and easy comfort, words simply would not sprout.

Yekase didn’t need comfort anyway. She spoke like reading a file; she showed Ling Yi an old scar that had faded to white.

...This person was shackled to the past.

Her smile wasn’t fake, but she could never smile with her whole heart, nor cry with her whole heart. Some RAM in her mind always ran the Twenty Second Squad as a background process. Something kept tugging her ankles like marsh mud. Until that was solved, no matter how far she walked, Yekase would live in yesterday’s weather.

What revived with the One-Year War wasn’t only a hero’s first heart.

Jiang Bailu never looked at all this. Or rather, in her eyes there was only that year of grit and sweetness with the Doctor inside the Sinister Organization. But Ling Yi couldn’t look away.

“Mm. We’ll bring them back. There’s a way to end this for good.” Ling Yi pulled Yekase’s hand up like lifting a fallen banner. “We’ll bring them back. We promised Lalabel that day.”

“And last time... that combo move I barely understand did bring one person home, right? The other three could—”

Yekase, steadier now, shook her head. She pinched out that flicker of hope like a candle in wind. “No. The Null Realm evolves, too.”

“...?”

“The Causal Horizon is the origin and end of all real matter, expressed as Infinite Power. The Null Realm is its mirror opposite, a lightless abyss that denies every concept. Both lie outside our dimension. Time and physics don’t matter to them...”

She paused. No matter how many times she ran it in her head, saying it aloud still felt unreal, like frost in summer. “But a place where even the concept of ‘darkness’ doesn’t exist—adapts. It evolves.”

“Is it tied to Flash Energy?”

“Maybe.”

Reverse energy. The true face of the Dirac sea—the Null Realm. When Flash Energy is generated, particles lower than zero are hurled to the far side and pile up into mire. Hong and Dongyue’s souls sleep in that mud. Even the strongest Magical Girl, Ivaris, could only claw out for a moment.

“Bottom line, Ouroboros is useless now. Unless we evolve it again—say, add a drop of Demon King Power, which is locked down in Shadow Curtain International’s HQ, with zero access to study. At that point, we’re better off trying a different road.”

Back when Shadow Curtain International was still on a scrappy Pacific rock, Konstantin somehow got a sample of Demon King Power. He built their first mech, Demon God Xeno. Not long after, the world turned into their chessboard. You can imagine how tightly they guard that method of tapping Infinite Power.

“A different road... from the ‘Kingdom’ of matter, stretching down to the ‘baseplate’ of pre-existence?” Yekase’s eyes went distant, thoughts sparking like flint. “Hiss... maybe we could use—”

“Doctor? Doctor?”

“...Ah! I’m fine. Let’s wander Mysidia a bit, grab dinner, then head back. I’m curious about the bookstores here. Maybe a magitek shop too—”

Like taking her heart out to sun-dry and then tucking it away again, Yekase returned to her usual self. She turned the mood with the ease of a fan flicking shut.

Good thing Ling Yi had prepared. “I looked it up on the way. There’s a viral bookstore in Mysidia called ‘Buttercup and Miss Alice.’ The plaque was penned by Alicia Alicia herself.”

“Doesn’t sound like her. She must’ve taken rare materials as payment...”

“Even a heavyweight in Alchemy needs cash?”

“Alchemy burns money like a furnace. Speaking of Buttercups, you know the ‘Goldilocks zone’? It’s where conditions line up just right for life—maybe even intelligent life. Earth’s the classic case. Picture the universe, the Milky Way, the solar system as boards with holes drilled. Stack them all. What’s left is the one overlapping hole—Earth.”

“Sounds like someone upstairs set it up on purpose.”

“Exactly. That intuition once ruled the day. Theists took it as scripture. The most famous was Newton, who invented the Grand Magic Baseplate under our feet. When his deterministic cosmology couldn’t explain the universe’s beginning, he turned to mysticism.”

They walked back onto Mysidia’s streets. Yekase pulled from a courier cube the souvenir from their Soviel trip—a witch hat whose tip always pointed toward Mysidia. Back in its longed-for homeland, it spun in happy circles like a puppy’s tail.

Yekase plopped the hat onto Ling Yi’s head, adding a little forced-but-cute Mysidia flavor.

“But for dinner—can you even eat like that, Doctor? Want to take off the head?”

“I rebuilt the whole skinsuit. I converted the hands—where I need fine motor control—into nanometal. I stripped out the injury buffer—wasted weight for me—and swapped in the Mechbreaker mask’s compression module. Now it’s like standard power armor. On and off at will.”

She undid the maid uniform’s front button and showed Ling Yi the emergency release button nestled between the headlights.

Ling Yi didn’t know where to rest her eyes. “Then why are you still wearing it?! Don’t tell me you’ve got... a fetish...”

“Idiot. Look at the floating tags above everyone’s heads. We’ve got them too. If I strip this off, you want me strolling the city with a nameplate the Church wants dead?”

“So what? This is an independent city-state!”

“That’s why you’re the muscle. And I’m the Doctor.”