The famous inventor Miss Yekase once said, “Life isn’t just oppression and resistance; you’ve also got machinery, supersonic flight, and magic cupcakes,” a spark tossed into a windy street.

Ten minutes ago she hadn’t said it; now it hung in the air like a neon sign after rain.

Yin, feeling a prickle of dread like cold mist on skin, thought, Whatever.

Yekase, hands moving like a clockwork sparrow, checked weapons and gadgets, then said over her shoulder, “If it goes hot, stick with the crowd. Watch for anyone off-beat.”

“Why not let me fight?” Yin’s voice tightened, a drawn bowstring in the dark.

“In a packed street, you wanna start shooting? Use your head,” Yekase said, dry as sand under sun. “And that ‘mask’—”

She shoved the Phase Shifter into Yin’s hands, sleek as a fish.

“—is for you to bail. Drop the weight till you’re back.”

Around them, the crowd was a tide of people, noisy and bright like lanterns at a festival, unaware of storm clouds quilting overhead. It wasn’t their burden to carry—yet the hinge of the problem creaked:

“Soville City’s local police…”

Wait—no way… a week ago Tiago Tutu stripped them bare; don’t tell me they still haven’t rebuilt their roster?

Dead and still making trouble, like ghosts rattling shutters at dawn.

Yekase fought the urge to roll her eyes, then spotted a figure crouched on a bollard like a night bird, waved, and pushed through the press.

“How’s it look?”

“They slipped into that empty alley. I didn’t follow—too easy to blow my cover,” Ling Yi said, voice low as rain.

“Okay.”

Ling Yi took Yekase’s hand, hopped down like a cat from a fence, then noticed Yin and flashed a warm smile, sunlight through leaves: “Sorry—go find Sister Bailu and Dorothy, yeah? They’re on the pedestrian bridge. Just follow this road.”

…Treated like a kid.

Yin nodded, slow as a drifting leaf, took one last look at Yekase, and turned away.

The two who remained pushed against the current, upstream salmon, and stopped at the mouth of a shadowed alley.

Every scenic town keeps an alley like this: outside, a tide of people; inside, dead bulbs and damp walls, a mouth to an otherworld with no warning sign nailed to the brick.

Yekase felt a déjà vu like old film grain from Twin Towers City, as if she’d walked this frame with someone and met someone else inside—yet the names slid like fish.

Anyway—

“I’ll go first.”

She drew a breath that tasted of wet stone and stepped in, a candle entering a cave.

Flaking gray plaster revealed red brick beneath, walls beaded with endless damp like sweat, stone paving loose as bad teeth.

Red-robed… would the War Sovereigns Curse be waiting inside?

Her hand twitched for the Polaris Staff, then memory slapped—reclaimed by Ivaris. She pulled the Southern Sky Cross and tucked it against her chest, a star pinned to cloth, and leaned around the corner.

No one was there.

…Only a wide wall, fresh paint still bleeding downward like melted wax.

Red, black, and gray strokes tangled into a dozen warped characters; her translator lens failed, but her gut recognized the shape the way you know thunder:

Der Gott ist TOT.

In Chinese: “God is dead.”

…

“—You two over there! What are you doing!”

“?!”

Two men in deep-blue uniforms, caps brimmed like shadows, marched in from the alley mouth, boots a drumbeat.

Cops?!

She’d just cursed Soville City’s thin blue line, and here they were like chairs scraped mid-song.

“Those graffiti around the city—your handiwork, right? We’re police. Under the municipal beautification ordinance, we’re questioning you.”

“…Tch.”

Yekase clicked her tongue, bitterness like black tea. Being framed was dime-a-dozen; she’d mocked main characters for eating blame—Play nice and you’ll be fine—yet now, with the hook in her own cheek, the laugh died.

If they got grabbed here, they’d be hauled in for a ‘friendly chat.’ If the red-robed ones—maybe the War Sovereigns Curse, maybe not—moved, she couldn’t even pivot.

“We’re going, Ling Yi.”

“Huh? …Got it!”

Ling Yi had been ready to comply, a glass of milk on a table; Yekase’s outlaw snap made her bounce twice like a sparrow. That extra courage, grown messy over the past year, sprouted in weird soil—she pulled two round trinkets from her pocket and flicked them to the ground.

Pop-pop—milk-tea-scented brown smoke blommed and swallowed the alley like a beached cloud.

“Hell—York Five?! The kid’s gone rogue—”

“Street vendor forced ‘em on me as samples!”

Under cover of sweet fog they bolted, legs like arrows.

Yekase wanted to switch identities on the fly, but Ling Yi needed armor to disguise, which would scream in a crowd, so they ran like brushfire.

“Stop! Stop right there!”

“Officer, we’re good people!”

“If you’re good, why run!”

“My name’s Luciferin. Ask when you’re back at the station!”

“Memorized a fancy name to con folks, huh!”

“See? You won’t believe me anyway!”

Two girls sprinted in front, two cops pounded behind, the whole street a flock of startled birds lifting in bursts. Yekase, half running, half laughing, snatched bills from her pocket—the foreign cash she’d swapped in Ivalice—slapped them onto stalls, and hurled whatever was on sale at the guards. She vanished under the stall owner’s yell of “Short seventeen-fifty!”

Yekase and Ling Yi were thin and quick, willow branches in a storm; the cops chased them for two blocks and then lost the wind, stopping in front of a bar.

“Think they ducked inside?” Tall Cop A asked, eyes scanning like lighthouses.

“Quiet up ahead. I’ll watch the street; you check,” Fat Cop B grunted, planted like a barrel.

They split. The tall one pushed in, blinked until the dim settled like dusk, flashed his badge to the drinkers, and stepped to the bar:

“Two girls run in just now?”

The bartender was polishing a glass, towel moving like tide; he glanced up and said, “Didn’t see. It’s all regulars who spend their days off here nursing gloom.”

“…That so. They’re suspects for defacing city property. If you shelter them, you’ll make our job hard.”

“Hard? When white fog choked the city the other day, where were you when it got hard?”

“…”

Red crept up the tall cop’s neck like sunrise; under a chorus of boozy cackles he slammed the door and skulked out.

Two minutes later, Yekase poked her head up from behind the bar, cat among bottles.

“Gone?”

“Gone.”

“You’re my brother in arms…”

“Try sister,” Shen Shanshan folded the towel and plopped it on Yekase’s head, like a hot-spring cap.

“So what’d you do this time? Boss said Soville cops are easy to talk to.”

Yekase shrugged, feathers shaking off rain: “Exactly. One jab from you and he left—easy talkers, right? Imagine Twin Towers—if a ranking official charged in, would he ask politely?”

“Oh, fair point.”

The drinkers roared, a murder of crows or just men sodden with spirits.

Ling Yi popped up, careful as a mole near sunlight.

Yekase unlocked her phone, screen gleaming like a pond, showing the photo of that wall.

“We tailed a suspicious figure. Followed into the alley and found this, still wet.”

“What does it say?” Shen Shanshan, cheerfully half-illiterate, asked without shame, clear as a bell.

“‘God is dead.’”

“Sounds kinda edgy,” Ling Yi cut in, eyebrows a sketch of lightning.

“Apologize to Grandpa Nietzsche,” Yekase said, lifting the towel and capping Ling Yi’s head like a pastry. “People twist it all the time. He wasn’t big on the church, sure, but he’s really tackling ‘How do you fight nihilism when religion’s already fading.’ Not ‘Heaven is dead,’ but taking the death of God as the starting line.”

“That’s worse!”

“About.”

She liked the question, ocean-deep, but Nietzsche’s answer crowned an Übermensch to lead the rest—too much elite worship, too much lone-hero myth.

Ascendants of Infinite Power ruling absolute over ordinary folk, a cleft like a canyon—the kind of world only Gu Xiangshi would enjoy.

So, what was the graffiti ghost trying to say?

Did he mean the reading Yekase laid out, or Ling Yi’s misread?

Ling Yi and Shen Shanshan, strangers stitched into comradeship, smacked a high-five over Yekase’s head, two sparrows meeting mid-branch.

Then Ling Yi folded the towel back onto Yekase’s crown, a cloud returning to a mountain.

Yekase didn’t notice the towel’s second landing, thoughts buzzing like bees: “All caps… all caps means a proper noun? Which would be…”

A death as a named thing, a god from myth with rules carved in frost?

An occult sort of death, sideways and sharp?

Yekase’s mind snapped bright. The Shadow Realm War had cribbed from Norse myth—she’d looked that up after the fight, runes carved deep in memory.

So this special ‘death’—was it pointing to the Norse saga’s most famous event, a rare, worldwide case of serial god-killing, an abrupt wipeout ending like a manga axed mid-run—

“Ragnarök?!”