Arcadia, the floating island hurtling toward Soville City, should’ve been swallowed by Coffee Moon’s two‑dimensional plane, flipped like a page of the world, and shot back into the sky—

…That was the plan.

“Useless, useless, useless! I know exactly what you’ve got, my disciple!”

Crack!

A glass‑shatter rippled across the clouds like a frost‑web spreading over the firmament.

The plane spanning heaven and earth choked mid‑swallow, quivering with a visible tremor like a drumskin struck off‑beat.

Cough!

Jiang Bailu doubled in the air, hand to her mouth. Blood threaded through her fingers, and a jagged wound split Coffee Moon’s ink‑black body like a canyon in night.

Under Tiago’s predatory surge of Sorcery, the warp field’s constant began to slip.

“Be good and become my new body! When I return to the summit of the True Ancestor and reign at the world’s crown, I’ll even credit you! I’ve already—gone beyond the limit!”

“Cough… cough…”

The overburdened field collapsed. The swallowed island’s foundation snapped back to its place in three‑dimensional space, like a stone returning to a riverbed.

Tiago, now dominant, flung her domineering, manic Sorcery wide. A boundless blood‑red fog poured out, blanketing a hundred miles like a crimson tide rolling over ruins.

Despair’s hush fell again on shattered Soville City, a winter silence pressing on broken roofs.

Arcadia was about to fall for real.

Even if they bypassed and killed Tiago now, the four had no strength left to break or carry off an entire floating island.

Was there no hope?

Soville City—the cradle of Infinite Power research, the pier of modern civilization, the ledger of countless scholars’ wills—and all its people, were they just going to meet annihilation?

Emptiness filled Jiang Bailu. She let go of her flight spell and dropped straight toward the scarred earth like a leaf in late autumn—

Yet her lips curved.

“But I—”

Yekase, Ling Yi, and Ivaris spoke over each other, catching her line mid‑fall:

“But we refuse!”

—Qualification check: passed.

Against Arcadia’s colossal scale, Ivaris and Ling Yi were pebbles; even the largest, Luciferin, was still an ant pushing a cedar.

Whether by instinct or intent, the three flew into an equilateral triangle. At its center, a translucent, azure storm rose like tidewater glowing under moonlight.

Soul Power—the will that binds wills.

“Ling Yi, switch!”

Yekase ejected from the cockpit. Luciferin’s core spun one‑eighty, shifting into Eden Zero, and unfolded another cockpit to seat Ling Yi like a flower opening to dawn.

Another rapid, intricate metamorphosis. The whole frame compacted into a knot of steel.

From it, one pair—two pairs—three pairs of iron wings speared outward like blades.

Then came lean limbs, a long tail, and a grim dragon’s head.

The Mechanical Dragon Ancestor—Balafaruth—descended.

Yekase mounted Southern Sky Cross. She and Ivaris traded a distant glance, then unleashed Flash Energy at full burn. With Balafaruth at the center, twin mirrored wings of light unfurled like sunrise mirrored on a lake.

They drove forward through the doomsday cloudbank of the falling island, cutting the sea of storm into a channel.

“To reach the horizon beyond the limit,”

Yekase said.

“One person’s strength won’t cut it,”

Ivaris said.

“We have to braid our comrades’ feelings and wills—”

Ling Yi said.

“…and turn a ‘zero‑probability event’ in statistics into ‘possibility’ in quantum,”

Jiang Bailu murmured.

The horizon.

Plunging at terminal speed, Jiang Bailu looked homeward by reflex. The eastern sun was just about to rise, a blade of gold piercing the monster fog at the world’s rim.

That was what they’d been fighting for all along—

Closing on Arcadia, the three locked into a primitive Belkan‑style array.

Yekase fed Flash Energy at the left node.

Ivaris fed Omega Ray at the right node.

Ling Yi fed Mind Energy at the center.

Tiago’s Sorcery suffused the field like storm humidity.

Soul Power blew the blood‑mist aside, carving a clear wind‑road through the red sea.

Six Infinite Powers lacked one.

“Hah. Human alchemists and their dusty ‘Archetype Realm’ event projection… it’s hilarious. Let’s see where you plan to find that last power.”

Tiago’s voice stacked from every pocket of fog, swinging direction several times in a single sentence, like space itself was cupped in her palm. Cold prickled down spines.

She wasn’t wrong.

Spiral Force—the sixth Infinite Power that refuses to play by the five’s rules—was missing, and none of the three could wield it.

Dawn of Eden’s Spiral Force bullet had already been spent to punch through the deceleration field. Even Yekase had no answer left—

Was that really so?

Yekase keyed the comm and shouted, “Bailu!!”

“No need to yell!”

Jiang Bailu pulled off the earpiece, raised her right hand, and pointed at their dwindling figures. Distance stretched like a river, but she felt it as a thread of heat—their hearts were still pressed together.

“Now—begin ‘spin’!”

They rammed into the invisible field.

On a Soul Power track that flattened curvature and ran near‑infinitely forward, Yekase and Ivaris orbited Balafaruth—iron wings spread—spinning faster and faster like twin swallows around a lighthouse.

Their exhaust traced rings at a fixed rhythm. Of the Infinite Powers, excluding Spiral Force and Soul Power, four rings formed in the air like halos.

Balafaruth flew through the four rings. The whole dragon blurred like heat haze.

She widened her eyes at the endless ahead.

Stars winked before her. The Soul Power quantum tunnel stretched like a river of silver, becoming a galaxy laid sideways across the universe.

At the galaxy’s whirlpool, a silhouette appeared.

A robot.

She didn’t know it, but she knew its name.

Thunderbolt Zeus.

Zeus’s phantom flowed and changed in the deep, but one thing never shifted: its twin engine‑like wings, so like Balafaruth’s, now spilling limitless rainbow particles outward, weaving wings of light wider than its own body.

“When gathered ‘will’ becomes one, new bonds will light the future!”

“Knew you’d shout that…”

Ivaris muttered, then smiled. “Fine. I’ll go crazy with you again.”

The two Magical Girls turned translucent in the blaze of Infinite Power and merged into Balafaruth’s chest like fireflies slipping into a lantern.

Roar—!

The long dragon‑cry ripped through rings and tunnel. Bursting out the far end, Balafaruth’s body, from head to tail, plated itself in heavy, ornate armor, perfectly matched to Zeus’s style.

Her thrusters no longer spat only Flash Energy. Each iron wing carried one Infinite Power, singing in chorus. Even colorless Sorcery and Spiral Force resonated, showing their true hues.

Sorcery, purple‑black.

Spiral Force, green.

“Become the road that shines!”

Balafaruth—Infinite Power Expansion!

She tore through the differential phase barrier. Her frame swelled past a hundred meters, a heavy‑armored giant of a dragon. Still small beside a floating city, yet now meeting it eye to eye like ridge to ridge.

Six‑fold wings beat with all their might, rising to meet the falling Arcadia like a mountain pushing up a storm.

The impact thundered. Heritage buildings shattered into gravel and ash, raining down like a gray monsoon.

But—they caught it.

A hundred square kilometers of city hung on a dragon’s shoulders, unable to sink another inch.

“Useless! Your power does nothing! Your will is worthless!”

Thousands of meters above Soville City, with an artificial meteor of doom wedged between them, Tiago and Balafaruth began their final grapple.

While Tiago wore a mask in Labyrinth City, her strength was half her peak. Jiang Bailu’s arrival became the turn, letting a quarter of the True Ancestor’s heart‑blood return to its rightful owner.

If it had stopped there, she’d be equal to Yekase in her normal state, nowhere near enough to shove an entire city like a hammer.

The real key was Flash Energy.

Jiang Bailu drank Yekase’s blood often, but Flash Energy never acknowledged her. The energy slept in her body, like Yekase during the Icarus era—only boosting basic functions.

Tiago plundered every drop without mercy. In her, it also acted as a body‑wide reinforcement.

Even Yekase didn’t know—the reinforcement scales by proportion.

And a True Ancestor’s baseline is terrifying.

Power flooded the darkness before dawn like a storm tide.

It felt like the world held only a dragon, a city, and a vampire.

No more room for tactics or clever hands. Both poured everything they had into Arcadia’s wreck, trying to shove it the other way.

And both knew this raw contest was about to end.

“Darling.”

Inside Balafaruth’s mental space, Ivaris sat on the floor, watching the outside through the dragon’s eyes like stargazing through a window.

“What is it?”

Yekase sat beside her. She didn’t look over, but their presence touched like palms under warm water.

“Hold my hand.”

“Okay.”

Ivaris’s hand was cool, smooth, and soft, like river jade.

They said nothing more. Shoulder to shoulder, they quietly fed Flash Energy and Omega Ray to Ling Yi.

Ling Yi’s voice rang in the boundless white mental space:

[Guys… um, emergency here. Could you not flirt in my head?]

…

“Uh.”