On the other side, Yekase and Ivaris were locked with a two‑headed stone fiend, sparks like flint in a dust‑thick gale.

Ivaris’s floating gun racks hit a wall—high magic resistance, HP like a mountain. She ditched offense and ran over to cheer Yekase, rain tapping a stone gate.

Yekase weighed the thing. This stone giant’s build was knotted with trick interlocks, more tangled than before, a nest of snakes. Disassembling by hand would take forever—perfect time to boot the mech.

Funny. In this day and age, she was actually in a “my base self can’t hack it, time to get in the suit” situation. Fresh as new rain.

Nice, nice, nice—

[Complete.]

A silver curtain of light unfurled, moonlight slit open. Luciferin—showing up more lately, mostly as Balafaruth fusion fodder—burst through and slammed a fist into the giant’s head, flipping it like a cart.

Yekase used a Levitation Spell to swallow‑dart into the cockpit, buckled in, hands gripping the sticks.

“I—I am Luciferin!”

She’d set the English name as Luciferin. Even if people took it as Lucifer, she didn’t care; all for shouting this line fair and square.

Life‑support hummed awake; movable armor closed over the cockpit, sealing it in the core like a shell.

Luciferin’s eye‑shaped monitors flared, twin suns lit across steel.

She often sidelined this mech in big events; after Labyrinth City’s “if you like it, run it more” tip, she’d flown Luciferin to swat small outfits before leaving Huaxia. Her piloting hadn’t gone rusty; oil through gears.

Gaze tracking turned the sweep of her eyes on the 360 display into a tiny cursor, a firefly darting to the lower‑right—weapon reserves and semi‑auto assist.

One rocket launcher, one Omega Ray gun, one physical combat knife. Two beam sabers, fueled by Omega Ray and Mind Energy, for real‑type and super‑type scenes alike. Knives on a moonlit belt.

Chest cannon, shoulder cannon, brain‑blaster cannon—ammo stacked like thunder in barrels.

On it!

Luciferin drew the rocket tube from her waist and fired. The stone giant, following autonomous logic, raised its left forearm and blocked with its mounted shield, cliff meeting wave.

Under guidance from an ace pilot out of Labyrinth City, Yekase treated Luciferin like a giant alien staff, forcing her already keen Infinite Force Perception into needle‑fine clarity, a lens to a pin.

Then—her breath hitched—she saw it.

The stone giant’s core, the cockpit‑equivalent, wasn’t the Silver Star Engine (artificial black hole)’s usual sphere of collapse. The lines were hacked apart, veins cut in marble.

Inputs and outputs ran fine, yet the processor’s outline and circuits were invisible. It needled Yekase, like a song with no singer; her OCD ticked.

What the hell?

Signal shielding? But Mind Energy flowed in the loops. Why shield a single engine? Some top‑secret trick worth all this fog around a tree?

All the more reason to crack the geode and look.

Firm in her choice, she sighted the cockpit. Chest and shoulder cannons pinned the giant, shield locked; she drew the physical blade, searching angles, a hawk circling a turtle.

She slipped the blade past the shield’s edge, rain under an eave.

Designers centuries back didn’t imagine MS duels. The autonomous system did nothing effective; the whole core came off like cutting cheese.

That’s the price of stacking anti‑beam coating and ignoring armor strength—glass armor under hail!

Yekase gave the pilfered‑cockpit giant a casual shove. Thoom. It crashed and didn’t move.

Eager, she shattered the stone plates over the core, peeling an onion of rock, and the layered secret showed—

An irregular crystal, frozen lightning.

About two by two by two meters. Too many facets, refracting rainbows, the inside a prism‑born storm.

Ivaris, burned by that stone giant earlier, seized a chance for payback. Ten floating cannons lit like a laser workshop, sculpting ice, regularizing the crystal and revealing the hidden within.

“Wh—”

It was a person, a moth in amber.

Inside the crystal, sealed, lay a man near forty, sleeping like winter.

European features, a tan windbreaker, a round sun‑hat. Straps chest to waist to thighs, tools and pouches everywhere—pro‑outdoor kit like Harrison’s, a hiker carved into quartz.

“All the traits match—he’s Brian, the big brother Harrison’s been looking for!” Ivaris whispered, eyes wide.

“What?!”

Wetware? A human brain processor? The stone mech’s a centuries‑old artifact. He doesn’t look like a volunteer. Did the fog’s master finally move, a hand in the mist?

Lasers kept whirring. The shell around Brian thinned under Ivaris’s careful, practiced cut, then shattered in a glittering spray. Shards skittered like ice.

Yekase stowed Luciferin back in the hangar, folding a silver bird, and landed nearby.

Ivaris folded the unconscious Brian like a dried fish and hung him on the Polaris Staff. “Breathing and pulse are there. We’ll hand him to Harrison later.”

“Mm.”

Yekase looked toward the square. Ling Yi and Jiang Bailu came shoulder to shoulder, twin shadows in fog.

“...Doctor.”

Jiang Bailu tilted her head, awkward, gaze on Soville City veiled in mist, a ghostly citadel.

Her chin got poked. She looked down—Yekase was pressing a chocolate lollipop toward her, smile bright as a small star.

“Welcome back, Bailu.”

Yekase turned to tense Ling Yi—and relief washed through. She could perceive her again; all the sealed memories had returned. The Reverse Meme had lifted just now.

“Doctor...?”

“Long time no see, Ling Yi.”

Hearing her name, Ling Yi jolted, then flew in and hugged Yekase, a bird to its nest.

“I really can’t live without you, Doctor—”

“No. Your solo run went well—made allies, gathered intel, protected the weak. Since the Reverse Meme dissolved, the wish must have completed, right?”

Yekase gently rubbed her head, smoothing down feathers.

“From your case, we can log new intel—once a wish completes, its related effects vanish. If I kept failing to perceive you, that only helps the mastermind. So the lift isn’t at their whim; it’s the fog’s rule.”

Ling Yi’s face was buried between Yekase’s average headlights; she murmured, muffled, “...can’t we do more of what people do when reunited?”

“I did say long time no see.”

“Not enough. I want a kiss.”

Crack, crack.

Ivaris rolled her neck nearby, an ice sheet shifting.

Yekase was terrified, a leaf in wind. Jiang Bailu wasn’t joining in—small mercy, probably guilty and cowed. Ivaris had vouched Ling Yi was a “good girl,” but that didn’t stop the trembles.

“Um...”

“Not the time, right? When the fog lifts and I’m back to Horizon, kiss how you like. Suffocate as many times as you please.”

“Why does that sound like I’m into suffocation?”

“You clearly squirt after just three times.”

“Uh.”

“Not even touching below; just choking and you squirt. You’re such a perv, darling.”

Ling Yi and Jiang Bailu’s faces were blinding, twin spotlights.

Despair—at this woman broadcasting someone’s kink in public, a black cloud dropping...

Sweating, Yekase wrenched the topic aside. “Let’s hurry back to the ground—”

“Makes sense,” Ivaris said, relenting.

The awkward air vanished without a trace, mist burned off by sun.

They fetched Harrison out from the residential shelters. The Polaris Staff’s back seat was taken by Brian, so he sat behind Yekase. Jiang Bailu was silent, face a knife’s edge aimed to skin.

They lifted slowly, slipped through the gravity inversion zone, and drew near Soville City, fish through a current.

With Brian saved, Soville City’s “labyrinthification” seemed undone. The fog stayed, but that bottomless, slight vertigo during observation had gone. Streets settled; the maze folded back to a normal European town.

Flying point, Yekase asked, voice cutting like a blade through fog:

“Harrison, what’s your wish?”

“W‑what? My wish... was to save my brother, right? That’s done...”

“Not quite, is it?”

Yekase had expected that answer and cut him off.

“Your wish should be ‘home and kin,’ shouldn’t it?”

“......”

“So the fog gave you Arcadia and ghosts.”

“Ghosts... are my... kin?”

“The ghost procession appeared close to when we entered the fog, right? Attacking those out at night is a medieval curfew abstracted. Not harming you proves blood ties.”

...But why did the ghosts and the city persist after he found home, not fading?

That piece knotted under water; Yekase couldn’t unravel it.

What step’s missing?

Did the fog’s master interfere?

Is it tied to the crystal that sealed Brian?

Thinking, she looked up. A dim moon with only a white rim hung there—a fingernail moon. The first true night since entering the fog had just arrived; new moon just past, the third lunar day.

“In Japanese they call it ‘mikazuki’...”

After reaching ground, she and Ivaris guided the two explorers out of the fog, set them at the outskirts, then flew back to meet Ling Yi and Jiang Bailu, shepherds guiding strays.

Visibility stayed low, yet alleys distinguished themselves, patterns emerging in mist. Infinite Force Perception returned to normal. Runic Words’ conceptual interference earned its name; Ancient Alchemy born from it deserved “law of all things.”

The two Magical Girls slid through quiet fog‑lanes, will‑o’‑wisps in a hush.

Maybe the stone giant fight left their minds worn. No one spoke; they flew side by side, twin cranes over reed beds.

But that calm didn’t last, glass before a crack.

As they neared the rendezvous—the town square—Yekase’s Infinite Force Perception rippled; an anomaly stirred like a fish under ice.

Ling Yi’s rose‑violet flame flared, a peony set ablaze.

Beside her, tangled sorcery streamlines bloomed—the sign Celestial Speech had linked to the Newton base, spell circuits primed, constellations wiring up.

The two energies didn’t collide. They streaked outward, blades striking an invisible foe, fighting something she couldn’t sense.

...Beyond perception?

Yekase’s pupils tightened, ink points.

Arcadia’s mechanical sentries?!

Why—are they on the surface?