Four hundred years rushed by like a wind-scoured river; from here, France takes its first step.

To time, cold as a blade of rain, France is nothing; it won’t halt for one person or a crowd, and sped‑up time cares even less.

Facing Alice, now an avatar beyond rank, the Flash Blade Princess choked back the ache of sudden parting; she forced thought to cut through the fog.

Right now they held Infinite Power in these forms—Flash Energy, Mind Energy, Soul Power, Sorcery, and the Omega Ray, a fistful of stormlight.

Only a misfit Spiral Force was missing, a crooked thread in a perfect loom that snagged the weave.

And nobody knew how many units each of the six should stack; it was a secret sealed like iron under ice, no labels on the jars.

Yekase back‑calculated by grit and memory; in Cloudlong City they fused an Ouroboros, so they must have known the golden ratio then, a recipe lost in smoke.

It meant the array had been scrubbed by Reverse Meme grime, erased like chalk by rain, tied to the “missing pieces” in memory and to ZEROS.

We have to reach the Causal Horizon, stitch cause and effect like a bridge over a chasm, or we’ll keep falling.

Seeing Yekase sink into plans, Ling Yi shouldered control of their body, steady as a hand on a bowstring in wind.

Freed from the World Tree, Alice adapted to her body of electric light in a heartbeat; every gesture shed dangerous sparks like comet tails.

The Flash Blade Princess could only slip like a fish through reefs, wait for seams, snap off quick counter‑cuts where light pooled.

Missiles, slashes, lasers—her usual tools struck and shattered like rain on a stone bell, leaving only echoes.

That gold‑and‑red figure loomed like a god stepping down from a fresco; just by standing, she drank every strike and turned it to food.

Common logic stopped at the door; the room inside was starless.

Another lightning giant in Cloudlong City could be hurt with Flash Energy; now Alicia Alicia was no mere “energy aggregate,” but the cliff at the end of Runic Words and Alchemy.

She wore the lightning giant’s shape like a friendly mask, just to be kind to our eyes, while the mountain behind it never moved.

Not only was defeating her a question with no numbers, even asking “how to beat her” felt absurd, like fencing with fog.

But Ling Yi never bows to nonsense; her temper strikes like a drum.

“Do we pop the big one? That new finisher from last time… Doc, snap out of it!”

“Ah? Oh!”

The Flash Blade Princess lifted the Sky Striker, cracked it like disposable chopsticks, and took a dual‑blade stance, a hawk with two talons.

“‘Blade Spell—’”

The split blades overlapped before her chest; energy welled between their angle, an iron‑red storm coiling like a hot scarf.

“‘Scissor Duel—Crossblades!’”

The storm rolled and slammed the lightning giant square in the torso, a furnace‑wind hitting an anvil.

Alice took her first forced step back; forearms crossed, she braced against aggressive Flash Energy, her gold‑red aura dimming like sunset.

But it wasn’t nearly enough to fell her; the mountain only shivered.

She stiffened to grind down the tornado, held like a statue in hail, then straightened and let fury ring like a bell.

[There was one who hid behind seniority to scold me, and one who fought me for invention rights. They ended as my footnotes, buried for centuries in dust.]

Hooke and Leibniz, huh? Yekase always felt Newton was talent without virtue; when she suspected Alice was Newton, that tiny hint of teacherly grace almost killed the guess.

“But they were vindicated—your scientific autocracy bought you a short high, and your moral rot got canonized in textbooks, taught to students like a cautionary lantern.”

[You… sure can talk! Your tongue’s a blade.]

“I won’t just talk; I’ll call you a siscon too!”

[???]

Alicia Alicia burned hot; anger crackled like a summer storm.

She reached to swat the darting Flash Blade Princess, but she was a physicist and an Ancient Alchemist, a pure STEM shut‑in with a pampered body.

She grabbed like at flies and missed, several times; pride pricked like nettles, and she dropped it.

Then she began to chant magic, words like gears turning.

[01, 10, “Let the unseen appear to me”!]

At her command, air boiled like a kettle; sparks erupted out of nothing, and the armor smoked like singed paper.

Lucky for them, the sparks were time‑hastened too; they lasted only an uncountable blink and slipped back into the unseen.

“It’s vacuum fluctuation!” Yekase said, mind lit like a lab lamp.

“Drop the theory! Tell me how to break it or how to dodge!” Ling Yi barely found her feet; the second wave came like a net.

She burst through the fire grid, but the sparks tracked her like wolves, biting hard on her trail.

Yekase fell inward, eyes on a chalkboard only she could see. “No, classic physics has no vacuum fluctuation; what is she even doing…”

She hadn’t erased quantum effects like a tyrant with a brush; she was compressing them, making them “degenerate,” a trick Newton pulled on history.

Science or magic, she re‑defined high theories in her own tongue, right or wrong, turning them into street‑speech charms.

That act itself mimicked “Magionization,” carving symbols into reality like a temple seal.

“As expected of a master of Runic Words—that’s ‘Borrowing Momentum.’ If every motion has precedent, you get baseline bonuses like a tide.”

“I don’t get any of that!” Ling Yi yelled, breath smoke in the rush.

“Say you want the Dragon rune to buff you as dragon‑blooded; you mimic the dragon’s manner and moves, and a bigger shadow walks behind you.”

“Wh—”

Yekase frowned. “We’re fighting a library that can grab any everyday concept; a database of the cosmos—she’s closer to the Horizon than we are!”

Time kept speeding up, a river steepening into a waterfall.

Even the Flash Blade Princess, built past reason, felt fatigue rise like ink in water, as if she’d fought a century without sleep.

Her inner clock shattered like a dropped glass; hands spun and fell.

How long had they been sped up? Fifty years? A hundred? Two hundred? Numbers felt like moths.

Sun and moon stitched into two seamless light rings in the sky, twin halos grinding like wheels.

Garden plants exploded into jungle, then browned and fell, seasons scything like harvesters.

Stone bricks fractured, railings collapsed, the castle grew moss and climbing ivy, a drowned ship under green waves.

A normal life, from zygote to grave, compressed and condensed, a short story flickering and gone in this lunatic Lost Paradise.

The Flash Blade Princess couldn’t spare eyes for Jiang Bailu on the ground; Alice shifted again, unleashing modern magic’s fourth spell—

[Electric Piercing].

Meanwhile, Jiang Bailu’s state soured like milk left in sun.

Her vampire body—True Ancestor’s direct line, blessed in person, a super vampire—could ride centuries like a ship, but only as unaging, undying driftwood.

Time still wore her down, a fine sand filling joints and bones.

She crawled like a prisoner on pitted mud, lifted her face toward a battlefield hung between stars.

She saw space around the Flash Blade Princess bloom with thousands of lightning spears, adult‑arm thick, forming a perfect sphere, 360 degrees of needle‑teeth.

They would pierce and erase her like a saint painted over with white.

No escape—but there was still something to do; a match struck in wind is still a spark.

“Cof—”

Jiang Bailu forced up her torso, pointed at the sphere’s heart, and screamed for her power until her voice bled.

“—Coffee Moon!!”

A pale ghost shimmered over her back, arms crossing into a strange sigil, soft light pooling like moonmilk.

This one‑of‑a‑kind ability made a mockery of the kilometers between them; an invisible shell formed around the Flash Blade Princess, seamless as eggshell.

In the next instant, countless accelerated spears flew into the warped field; from outside, they froze like someone hit pause, hung in place.

Only Jiang Bailu knew those millions of bolts still advanced, still pushed at light speed toward the center like ants toward sugar.

But the space between target and spear stretched without end, turning the road into a horizon that never arrives.

Coffee Moon’s duration is near‑infinite if you don’t swap coordinates; they’ll never reach the center, never slip out of the spherical field.

It’s like a black hole, a throat you can fall in forever.

In an idol‑bound substrate led by concepts, if a thing looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, feels like a duck, it is a duck.

And then it becomes the duck, the concept bites, and the world nods.

[In my perfect, sacred “Archetype Realm”… a singularity?!]

“Try explaining that, big scientist!” Ling Yi taunted, words sparking like flint.

The two, mismatched in size, snapped and traded barbs outside; inside the event horizon, at dead center, the Flash Blade Princess felt a “gravity.”

“If light can’t arrive, and time stops flowing into a calm pond—think about it—that’s a black hole, right?!”

They could communicate like this—threads crossing in a loom of void—who knew?

It was a taste Yekase knew well, not of this dimension; now Ling Yi felt it too, a cold mint on the tongue.

Not breaking through from “over there,” but laying a bridge from “over here,” plank by plank over fog.

Space warped to the extreme, time bent like hot steel, energy huge as a sun; together they sparked a macroscopic quantum effect.

It tore a veil at the Flash Blade Princess’s coordinates, a curtain ripped by invisible hands.

She heard a familiar voice, bright as chimes.

“‘Quantum effect’ has been overused to death by lazy pseudo‑sci‑fi. We Magical Girls need a chicer word—how about ‘miracle’? It’s not been that long since we met.”

A window and a door appeared before her, a postcard of home written in light.

The window flipped open with a clap; a slender arm reached through, grabbed the outside doorknob, and twisted it down like turning fate.

“This way, I can finally, finally go home. Tell me—why can’t people give up hope?”

The visor’s left eye lit once, a firefly blink.

“Because the wavefunction can diverge.”

Ivaris dove into the Flash Blade Princess’s arms, nuzzled her visor like a cat finding a warm lap.

“Good answer! One point to you.”