At the end of the fight, in an apple orchard burned to ash, two slender figures faced each other.

“Runemaster Alicia Alicia’s final masterpiece, the Inevitable Cosmos. I asked my teacher. It’s a grand rune that only works in theory, overwriting reality with a classical physics model. That’s the truth of your Prototype Realm, isn’t it? Half-truths are just dressed-up lies.”

Yekase spoke first. “That day… I did feel the ‘romance’ you spoke of, and saw that future you painted. So I thought, fine, I’ll bet on your feelings.”

“Looks like you won the bet.”

“No, I lost… I’m twenty-eight. This is only the second time I’ve felt this miserable. Losing my whole bankroll at the tables probably feels like this.”

“Not regret?”

“I’m sad for you.”

There wasn’t a flicker of anger in Yekase’s eyes, none of the heat of being tricked or used. Of course there wasn’t. She’d never believed; so how could she be deceived?

“The Third Seat skipped in the Shadow Realm War was Fujiwara Ningning, wasn’t it? You sent her into the royal city to kill Dorothy’s adjutant. Back in Arcadia, you weren’t avenging anything. You were silencing witnesses.”

Her face held the ache of watching a close friend wander too far down a wrong road.

“I wish—so badly—that your dream were real.”

Alice showed no fluster at being unmasked. As if she’d always known Yekase knew, and chose to keep the theater going anyway.

“A dream is a dream, in the end. Humanity now is lost in endless infighting and petty war. Give them possibility, and they squander it—”

She raised her hand. Milky runes spun and flickered at her fingertips. She was done talking.

“I’ll grant them equal immortality and observable future trajectories. War and oppression will lose all meaning. Until they awaken, reconcile, and correct themselves, they’ve no right to gaze at the stars!”

“You never needed a license to look up at the stars!”

In the end, neither truly trusted the other.

…All acting.

Nothing but acting.

Dreamlike, wasn’t it? Master and disciple at odds on the surface, with a covert rhythm under it—both performing to deceive the other.

…Was it really just that?

Two people staring across from opposite ends of the modern age. Two people trying to iron out every birthright injustice. In a few months of playing teacher and student, did they really grow no respect, no fondness, no wry “we’re actually alike,” no kinship of flint and flint?

By now, even they probably couldn’t say.

“—Told you, Doc’s about to start healing with words.”

“—It’s practically a signature move now.”

Two silhouettes dropped in behind Yekase and stood with her.

“You two…”

She didn’t have time to turn. Someone bit her on the shoulder from behind and drew a bead of blood.

“We’ll settle this later.”

Yekase rubbed the bite mark and hunched, guilty.

Alice watched the three reunite in their little victory. She arched a brow. “Then let’s begin.”

—There’s something off here.

Alice had been preparing to seize the Golden Apple for months. She dragged the troublesome Yekase in, tried every control trick, failed, and only then struck that ridiculous surface pact. That says enough about her hunger for the Golden Apple.

But in truth, she only needed that massive, condensed sorcery to trigger the Inevitable Cosmos, to collapse and erase Earth’s tangled quantum parameters.

If she took that step, there’d be no more “possibility” on Earth. Every particle’s position and velocity would be fixed. The future extrapolated would happen, absolutely. She herself would become a god of classical mechanics who knew all—

—She’d become Laplace’s Demon.

Then she’d bring “soul” in on the occult axis, bind human thought, feeling, and will, and sidestep the collapse… Yekase could guess her playbook.

Which made one thing strange.

Alice knew Yekase would never hand her the Golden Apple. Yet she made no real preparation for that.

Whether she was Newton herself, or a shard/puppet/clone made by Newton—since that Mysidia ID was fake, and the World Tree ban was fake—why didn’t she take the Apple with her own hands?

It made no sense.

Unless—

Shock knifed through Yekase. Her eyes flew open. “Unless there’s a reason it has to be me holding the Golden Apple…!”

Vmm!

Alice’s fingertip runes fired.

A vast circular baseplate, inlaid with a hexagram, unfurled from beneath her feet and blanketed the entire royal garden in a heartbeat.

“In Eden, under the serpent’s temptation, the witch plucked the forbidden fruit.”

The baseplate… She’d gathered the concepts needed for the grand rune adjudication, and jacked into the idol baseplate!

“Eden”—the French royal garden.

“Serpent”—dragons are deemed kin to serpents; Ling Yi had just arrived.

“Forbidden fruit”—the Philosopher’s Stone, the Golden Apple.

“Witch”—and isn’t Yekase called the Scarlet Saint and the Witch, two faces of one coin?

Alice spread her arms, one up, one down, and unsealed two point masses in the void. “06, 09, ‘Let what has perished return to me!’”

—!

The orchard, long destroyed, sprang back lush in an instant.

French soldiers lined outside the trees, Fujiwara Ningning and Nicholas prone in the grass, Charlotte hovering in the air—all that had burned was suddenly before every eye. As if the Runic Words resurrected them where they fell.

But they were only cut-out afterimages.

Like Arcadia’s dead… no, their souls had already blown away. These traces held no self. They just repeated the last motions before death, mechanically.

“What has perished”—the place the banished ancestors of humankind can never return to.

“This place is Paradise Lost!”

…

Question: Alice also fit the “witch” concept, yet gave that seat to Yekase. So where did she stand on this baseplate?

Answer: the one who granted the witch a body—the maid automaton shell—and wisdom—the knowledge of Alchemy.

The Creator.

Also called the First Mover.

“This surge… this clarity… I’ve become the god of the Inevitable Cosmos!—01, 06, 09, 10, ‘Origin Things, build my form!’”

Four inverted Tree runes again!

Alice’s body dissolved into gathered energy, a knot of light too fierce to look at.

She rose and fused into the World Tree’s trunk behind her. In a blink, thunder split and the ground bucked.

“Doctor, let’s combine first!” Ling Yi shouted.

“Good call… whatever stunt she’s pulling, we stop it first!”

So bright. Jiang Bailu’s look was bright enough to sting.

Ling Yi didn’t notice, or pretended not to. She raised her key and shouted, “HAYATE!”

—02.

Yekase could only echo, a touch guilty. “ROZES!”

—00.

“Flashblade Activation—Cross-Flash!”

Their shadows overlaid like stacked layers. A sheet of Flash Energy swept over them and condensed into one figure.

The final fusion form of Flashblade Red and Mechbreaker, already used once in Soville City: Flash Blade Princess.

Rrrr-rrrumble!

Before them, the World Tree that lanced sky to earth shuddered violently. Then it tore up by the roots, shook off soil, and rose into the sky.

Mysidia on the crown—ah, they just dropped a massive teleport and bailed!

I’d hoped they’d help to protect their home… whatever. That’s mages for you.

The World Tree left a crater tens of kilometers wide. You could glimpse Alice’s rabbit hole, but not the two halves of the Golden Apple Yekase had seen.

“Did she absorb it?”

Yekase’s face tightened in the shared mindspace.

“Should we burn the World Tree?”

Ling Yi, eager as a spark.

On the trunk’s whorled surface, a human shape grew, its face beyond recognition. Her arms and legs had fused deep into the wood. Only a lignified torso and head hung outside.

“All the world’s sorcery flows through me… I am Isaac Newton. I am—the First Mover!”

Alice’s voice came from the wooden mouth, warped by some great distance.

“03, 06, 10, ‘Aurora of Life!’”

Sorcery so pure it showed violet-black burst from the trunk’s heart.

She opened with a massive AOE.

Yekase switched her left black armor to blue. Going by Nightlight Torch’s feel, she pointed at Alice in midair.

“Blade Spell—Hindrance Ripples!”

Blue floating BITs slid free from her back plates like thinking swallows. They looped twice, then snapped into interlocked energy shields, bracing Flash Blade Princess from behind.

The rest of the blast fanned outward. Jiang Bailu flipped gravity and stayed with the Princess, using Coffee Moon to shear the beams away. But elsewhere—forget the palace—what about a million Parisians?

“—01, 07, 08—”

A familiar voice rose from the ground.

Dorothy, long missing, unscrewed the maid automaton’s head-plate and raised her right hand high. At her fingertip, the emblem of the House of Blois burned like a white-hot lamp.

“This is my first and last time borrowing royal privilege. In the name of Blois—restart the Grand Paris Barrier!”