Ivaris came back to the bar with a middle‑aged man in tow, like a gust of road dust blowing in from the door.

“...?”

Yekase felt a cool swath of color wash across her brow, a fresh breeze against the mind, then heard the man say, “You, right? I’ve already met your friend. She’s fine. Don’t worry.”

“—Huh??”

Yekase shot Ivaris a puzzled look, a sparrow tilting its head.

“I went to find ‘01’ and saw they’ve teamed up for now,” Ivaris said, voice steady as a lantern. “This adventurer hooked up with Soville City’s residents and dug up tons of intel. I didn’t feel like relaying all that piece by piece, so I brought him.”

“Oh. A local intel web.”

Yekase’s shoulders dropped like a load set down. “They won’t talk to me, not even a twitch. If he can connect, even better.”

“You had a big discovery, didn’t you? Start with that,” Ivaris ordered, her words crisp as flint.

“Right! Last night, I was out south of town, chatting too long with residents I’d gotten familiar with. Time slipped like sand; I headed back late and got hit by a patrolling swarm of ghosts.”

“Attacked?” Yekase looked him over, eyes like a measuring blade. “No wounds. Doesn’t look like you can fight. That’s convenient.”

“No, no, I’m a plain old adventurer. I’ve only dealt with beasts in no‑man’s land. Ghosts in packs? Forget it! I’d already given up—flat on the ground, waiting to die—”

Harrison’s voice shook like a kettle about to boil. He unsnapped his canteen, took a long pull, then calmed. “But those ghosts… they circled me for a bit, watched like owls at dusk, and then just left! They left me curled up like a pill bug on the dirt and drifted away.”

“Hmm?”

“Weird, right?” Ivaris cut in, a blade of moonlight. “I tested him on the way here. It checks out.”

“Please don’t do that again...”

“You’ve got the smallest courage for an adventurer,” Yekase said, and gave him a light kick, a bootprint of affection.

Still, a seasoned wanderer resets fast. Harrison laid out the locals’ intel in short, clean lines, like staking a tent. Yekase memorized everything save the pieces about Ling Yi, which slid off her mind like rain off oilskin.

“So, we can make a hypothesis.”

Yekase thought for a beat, then raised her head, eyes bright as flint sparks.

The two watched her with a hunter’s stillness.

“Suppose the mastermind’s power is ‘to make the sought appear.’ The mist is the essence of that power. The rest—ghost arrays, Arcadia, sky chains—are shaped to match outsiders’ wishes.”

“Locals don’t trigger the anomalies,” Ivaris added, calm as slate. “Their travel just gets hard. Ghosts force them to hole up at home.”

“I—I think so too,” Harrison said, nodding, like a reed in wind.

Yekase counted on her fingers, knuckles clicking like abacus beads. “We’ve confirmed three wishes: Brian’s, mine, and ‘01’s... Ivaris, what’s your wish?”

“To stay with you a while longer.”

“Okay. Four.”

No hesitation, no doubt—like two stars speaking across a river of night.

Harrison stared at these two inverted girls, black and white like yin and yang. Their banter hummed with a shock he couldn’t name—so seamless a bond a mosquito couldn’t slip through; a glance carried whole conversations, and the clipped words seemed there only so an outsider like him could keep up. Yet each was complete as a blade—lose one, and the other would shoulder both lives and keep walking, flint‑hard and forward.

“Harrison, your wish is to find Brian. That’s close to my wish to find the Twenty Second Squad. So why didn’t the mist bring him back?”

“I... don’t know. Maybe once the ghosts took him, he got counted as part of the mist?” Harrison shook his head, a pine shedding snow.

“Let’s assume that.” Yekase’s voice tightened like bowstring. “Then the remaining components are Arcadia and the chains. Which means there are two outsiders in Soville City we still haven’t met?”

And one more—Jiang Bailu, likely turned dark.

What’s her wish?

Why did she come to Soville City at all?

Yekase’s brow furrowed, a ridge line under storm.

But the bag of evidence was empty; further thinking would just spin layers of guesses, matryoshka dolls of doubt.

In that stillness, she made a major call:

“At this point, we eat.”

She pulled a raw sweet potato from her space buckle, orange earth clinging like memory.

“Girl, how are you eating that?” Ivaris asked, half laugh, half wince.

“I’ve got a field pot...” Harrison raised a hand, hopeful as a sapling.

Yekase tossed the fist‑sized yam in her palm and wagged a finger, smug as a cat. “You don’t get it. City folks, honestly—ai!”

She dug out two more, one big, one small, stuffed them into Ivaris’s arms, then picked a flower bed along the road. She crouched, and with her Yanwu dagger, sliced the soil like silk and dug a pit.

She scooped in dry twigs and fallen leaves, swept in wind‑crumbled branches with her boot, stacked bricks around as a windbreak, then flicked a Flame Burst Spell. Fire bloomed, red as pomegranate.

“Throw!”

“Uh—oh!”

Ivaris flung her sweet potatoes in. Yekase used the dagger to stir and cover them in burning brush, then dusted off her hands and sat to watch the fire, a lone witch by a roadside shrine.

Crackle, crackle—

Twigs popped like seeds in oil; the flame’s tongue breathed a steady whoosh, a hearth inside the night.

Yekase didn’t tend the fire anymore. The front of her body glowed like ink warmed to life. Her gaze was lost in the vivid ribbon of flame, spellbound by red, not chasing any thought at all.

Ivaris could tell—no plan, no scheme, just the quiet of someone thawing her hands at the world.

In the tangle at the event’s heart, crouching in a city flower bed to pit‑roast yams—call it rustic romance if you want, but it drifted far from real rusticity.

For her, it was simply ordinary, like tying boot laces.

Ivaris crouched close, shoulder to shoulder, and nudged her, two sparrows sharing a branch.

“Pit‑roasted smells better.”

“What’s the science?”

“No science. Just the earth’s breath. Heaven and earth qi, you know?”

After a dozen minutes, with no new wood, the fire died to ember. Yekase pulled out the charred sweet potatoes and lined them up large, medium, small, like stones by a stream.

She took the biggest for herself.

“Wow, this one!” Ivaris yelped, snatched the medium, quick as a fox.

Only the smallest remained—barely a fist.

“...”

A man who eats can’t complain; Harrison took the tiny one. He peeled the blackened shell carefully from the middle. The ash flaked away without touching the amber flesh. Steam rose slow as mist; the sweet scent wrapped the three like a silk shawl.

“Good,” Ivaris mumbled around a mouthful, voice warm as coals.

“Soft and glutinous, but not cloying... my Lord.”

“My mom grows them in our garden,” Yekase said, launching into a pitch like a market bell. “No pesticides, no additives—healthy and nourishing! Cutting‑edge teleport box tech locks in freshness and flavor. Order now, and once we wrap this incident, you get same‑day pickup! Small business, limited stock—first come, first served!”

“Give me two pounds. I’ll take them back to the Horizon to savor.”

“They’ll get cold, right?”

“Dad will rev the engine to heat them.”

“Fair point.”

...

...

“I have a request,” Harrison said after the last bite, head lowered with honest weight.

“What is it?”

“Arcadia in the sky—I want to go inside. To set foot in that vanished city of glory is the ultimate dream of European explorers, going back centuries!”

“Okay. Denied.”

“Eh—?!”

Yekase’s face went serious, iron under silk. “Do you know how dangerous that is? Ghosts on the way, an air wall that stops flight, and who knows what worse risks inside. You can’t fight—you’ll slow us down.”

“No need to worry! I’m top‑tier at running away!”

“Which is useful,” Ivaris chimed in, sunlight on steel. “We’re going up anyway. A well‑preserved ancient site—bringing a seasoned adventurer to explain things is perfect.”

“You didn’t see it on the Horizon?”

“The Horizon has everything, but I only have one pair of eyes and one brain. I’m not some all‑knowing yokai.”

Her reason was airtight as a sealed vault. Yekase had to admit she’d overestimated her... and then got punched for it. Admit or not, the punch was coming; should’ve kept quiet.

They set their plan and waited for night. When darkness pooled like ink, they tailed a squad of ghosts. Jiang Bailu didn’t show—either she wasn’t in this squad, or something else had happened.

Ten minutes later, dawn thinned the dark. The ghosts lifted toward the sky—

“Celestial Speech, Flight Spell!”

Two Magical Girls, black and white, cast in unison, voices like bells.

Ivaris rode the Polaris Staff. Yekase rode the Southern Sky Cross. One ahead, one behind, they gave chase.

Harrison dangled between the two staffs on a safety rope, like a live bomb waiting to be dropped. He clutched the buckle till his knuckles went white.

They reached the crossing chains. The air thickened around them, sticky as honey.

“It’s coming!” Ivaris shouted. “Get ready—three, two, one—Helen Disk!”

At her call, the Helen Disk snapped into being around them, a sharp wedge. Immune to anything but magic, it held like tempered glass.

“Parallel, Passion, Continuum—Levitation Spell!”

Something unseen slammed into something vast; the momentum bled out fast, like surf melting on sand. They were about to stall, falling into the slow.

Yekase lifted the Dawn of Eden and fired backward.

A red jet roared.

She flicked the cylinder, fired a silver ray.

Flicked again, unleashed a colorless beam.

Flash Energy, Omega Ray, and Sorcery—threefold drive kept the makeshift flyer pushing ahead a little longer. Still no breach in the deceleration zone. How thick was this layer?!

One more force—she needed one more push.

She had one shot of Mind Energy left... no. Save that for the “Survival” continuous blade. That left—

Yekase flicked the cylinder three times and set the hammer on that bullet.

Under Mr. Simmons’s guidance, she’d finally tuned it—the bullet of Spiral Force.

Continuous blade? No. Not like that.

Spiral Force was fundamentally different from other Infinite Power. It could only carve spiral tracks onto them, never mix—fusion as intent, isolation as trait, a paradox folded like paper.

But if Flash Energy evolves, targeting that “isolated” trait—what then?

The answer:

“Paradox Fusion—!!”

Two Infinite Powers, both scattering and gathering, expanding and contracting, wound around the three, cocooned them, then unfurled into a spiral that opened the road ahead, a drill toward the future.

“Let’s go see it—the far side of the high wall and the chains!”