“No, not there. This way,” she said, tugging them along like a kite string in a fickle wind.

To their surprise, Akano Souu led them past rows of Bandai official counters, like skirting a gleaming reef, then slipped into the underground concourse that once linked to the subway like a hidden stream.

“Ground level’s for big outfits to buy in bulk,” Souu said, voice calm as a shaded lane. “We just need some gray goods from the underground street.”

They took the stairs where lightbox ads had faded like old murals, rust freckling the rails like dried moss after rain.

Noise hit them like surf against stone, and the smell of food rose like steam from a winter pot.

Hawkers sang, friends chatted, laughter pinged off tile like sparrows scattering at dusk.

It didn’t feel like a combat special zone with knives in the wind, but a lost Tokyo street under festival lanterns.

From the stair mouth, the underground stretched like a market river, bodies a tide, dozens of stalls flanking the alley like bright fish.

Souu started explaining, her tone steady as a teacher’s chalk line on slate.

Japan’s proxy wars were nominally two Sinister Organizations crossing spears, but before battle they hired small groups to pad numbers, like borrowing blades to keep the family sword unstained.

Among those hired hands were people laid off by a sour economy, pushed onto the fighter’s road like leaves swept into a gutter.

Their fighting power was near zero, a paper shield in a storm, yet they found a lane.

They packed the space meant for weapons with merchandise, then flipped it for a markup, like peddlers carrying shutters on their backs.

It was always cheaper than the zone’s official price, so under the official district, the folk drew a chalk circle of truce and called it the Wasteland Kiosk.

Every house hides a hard-to-read scripture, reasons tangled like roots, and Yekase could only keep a thin kindness when they weren’t enemies, like pocketing a blade instead of drawing it.

If a fighter can’t fight and won’t fight, are they still a fighter, or just armor without a heart?

By her old mow-them-like-grass style, Yekase could have solo speedran this underground street, but her hands stayed at her sides like sheathed steel.

The place tugged up the black market under the Twin Towers, a memory like a lantern through fog.

Right after she “resigned,” she had only half a year’s rent prepaid, and her tinkering dreams were empty drawers, no parts, no wire, just dust.

She bought a half-cold bun spared from a steamer, a noon sun gone pale, then stepped into the southern black market like entering a mirror world.

What unfurled before her then was a labyrinth from another world, and today’s underground wore the same shadows and shine.

“Miss, I can tell at a glance you’re 2D. Latest Shoujo Jump. Great price!” The voice popped like a cracker underfoot.

“Eh? Ah.” Her mind drifted back, then settled like a leaf on water. She eyed the bespectacled uncle who had drifted close, and asked, “How do you know I’m 2D?”

“Aura,” he said, as if pointing at a moon everyone else had missed.

“Aura??” Her brows rose like shutters.

Yes. That feeling—just like that, a paper fan flicked open.

Before coming, Yekase imagined Japan as a 2D nation fueled by capitalism’s sugary rush, a cotton-candy sky over arcades.

But she’d hit ground into a hijacking, then a sea landing, then jumped straight into a live-action battle royale, a movie that reeked of cold steel.

Only when a 2D appeared did she jolt back, like a bell struck, and remember she was here on a honeymoon with Ivaris.

“Then tell me, what aura do I have? If you sell the same mystic line to everyone, I’m not buying.” Yekase spoke with playful heat, a cat paw on silk.

The uncle pushed his thick glasses up with a middle finger, a glint flashing like a blade’s smile, and he began his read.

“First, your near-white silver hair. No normal person has that, that’s a 2D-only moe point, like snow on a summer roof.”

“What about me?” Ivaris called, her voice a spark.

He ignored her and kept on. “White shirt and pleated skirt is the so-called virgin-killer combo, but you’re also wearing a straw hat and a scarf, seasons crossed like stripes, and that vibe is... odd.”

“No normie girl would dress like that, not with that off-season swing, and those dragon horns… your pupils are human-round, so the horns are just decoration, right? That only proves you’re 2D.”

“What, he’s nailing it point by point…” Yekase felt the floor tilt like a boat on a pond.

So this middle-aged 2D uncle was a hidden detective, a plain stone with a gem inside.

But Ivaris’s proud silver hair had been brushed aside like a feather, and that made her very angry, a small fire catching dry straw.

She moved right up to him. “Then what am I?”

“You?” His eyes gleamed, and with Yekase’s nod his confidence rose like steam. He shot Ivaris a glance. “Do I need to say it? Marching into the zone in a maid outfit, the smell of 2D hits from ten meters.”

“You!?” Ivaris flipped her eyes like flipped cards.

“He just admitted you’re 2D. Why’re you mad?” Yekase asked, voice light as a breeze through beaded curtains.

“Minus one point!” Ivaris declared, a stamp on a scorecard.

“Uh?”

“Your girlfriend gets angry and your first reaction isn’t to soothe her. That’s a deduction!”

“I know little things don’t sway you,” Yekase argued, words tight as a bowstring. “That’s absolute trust in you.”

“Mm-hm? Really?” Ivaris tilted her head like a swallow.

“Really.”

Akano Souu watched the two of them slide fully into shopping-couple mode, and a weariness rose from her bones like evening mist.

Was this truly the same battle maid who had closed on her in the factory with a long-handled mace, an invincible aura like thunderhead pressure?

And her ‘mistress’—silver-haired lady with straw hat and scarf, seasons tangled like vines—by what string did she steer that maid?

She drifted through the zone like walking a garden path, doing nothing and yet radiating a calm that mocked the storm.

These two… were the helpers her brother found, bright coins tossed into a deep well.

Yekase bought that issue of Shoujo Jump, then strolled and chatted with Ivaris, their voices weaving like ribbons, and she bought Ivaris a red X-shaped hair clip, pinning her side locks with a touch like a feather.

Then she pulled a transfer case from her kit, took out a blue clip of similar shape, not the same series, and snapped it into her own hair like a blue petal.

“Eh, that clip is…”

“Prize from the water park,” she said, smile easy as sunlight on tile.

“You kept it?”

“It’s not broken. Why throw it?” Her words sat plain and warm, like tea in a clay cup.

“It’s just… uh,” Ivaris said, sour as green plum. “When you synced with Ling Yi, the base form for Gale, Roze, was black, right? I thought black was your color. Like the original Precure.”

“Nope, and Roze got snatched by Ling Yi as her Magical Girl handle right after,” she said, the memory a swallow winging by.

After many painful deductions, Yekase sensed it at once—jealousy here, like a blush under powder.

Not the kind that thinks she’ll betray, but the kind that wants her to say it aloud, to soothe and sweeten it, like a candy offered after a tease.

Women are trouble, she thought, amused as a fox. They’ll seriously slow my run to world’s number one engineer.

“Relax. I don’t have a signature color. If I did, it’d be red. Red’s the color of heroes.”

“Minus one,” Ivaris said, tapping the air like a judge’s gavel.

“Why another deduction? I denied it!”

“Is the color the point?!” Her glare was a cat’s tail swishing.

They finished, both knowing the tune, and burst into laughter like chimes in wind.

Souu trailed behind feeling excess as a spare wheel, unable to fight or flee, despair sitting on her shoulders like a wet cloak.

Luckily, Yekase turned to her, leaned close with a secret at her lips, and asked, “I heard onmyodo is popular in Japan. In the field, it doesn’t look that way. What’s the real deal?”

“Ah? Onmyodo…” Souu blinked, the topic jump a stone skipping far.

She’d helped her mother receive clan visitors since middle school, and learned to read faces like weather, but Yekase’s smile was a still pond she couldn’t see through.

No change. No ripple.

She couldn’t catch restraint or recklessness, only a precision like clockwork and a lady’s mask with a gentle curve.

No, no human holds an unchanging face so long by will, not when she’d been lively with her maid, her expressions quick as birds.

That “unchanging” feeling might be Souu’s illusion, a heat mirage on a highway, a trick of thirst.

It was like she wasn’t thinking at all, just smiling with the current, an empty companionable smile anyone could wear in a crowd.

Airheaded heiress, head like a hollow gourd—families saw those often enough, a vase on a shelf.

Or there was another possibility: Yekase’s level towered so high that Souu saw only cloud.

The thought made Souu shudder, a leaf in a sudden wind.

Behind Yekase she seemed to glimpse a bottomless abyss, and in it a tower of pale bones, piled from the pit’s dark to a ceiling of mist, a spine that pierced the sky.

One misstep and she’d fall, and become one more rib in that stack.

Do not be this woman’s enemy, her bones said. She’ll strip you clean, down to smoke and ghost.

“Onmyoji…” Souu answered at once, voice tightened like a knot. “You know proxy wars allow off-field factors, right? Onmyoji sit in that shadow.”

“Besides the recluses in the mountains, the ones who walk among people are kept by the great families like hawks hooded on a perch.”

“They curse-kill people?” Yekase asked, tone cool as a winter stream.

“Some do, but those curses are savage, fog-wrapped, and rare,” Souu said. “Usually they summon shikigami, buy off restless yokai, and do the dirty sabotage no one admits to.”

There it was. Yekase had guessed how crooked onmyoji could be, but knew Mind Body Manipulation wasn’t some street trick, so she’d wanted a baseline; this was within her fence.

“Do you know the Fujiwara?” she asked, a pebble dropped into still water.

Thud.

The snack pack Yekase had stuffed into Souu’s hands hit the ground like a drumbeat.

Souu snatched it up, then grabbed the straw-hatted lady and dragged her aside, her voice low and sharp like a knife behind a fan. “Don’t say that surname in the street. You want to get tagged?”

“How so?” Yekase asked, innocent as a blank page.

“They’re the top of the seven famous onmyoji lines—the ‘Name of Curses’ first seat, a horror group,” Souu hissed, eyes flicking like minnows. “Just saying it lets them sense your position and your name.”

“Whether they chase you or not depends on their mood, like thunder choosing a tree.”

“Ah, so they do have it?” Yekase’s eyes brightened, a lantern lit.

“Have what?” Souu blinked, dread knotting like reeds.

“A scary-sounding ranking. That’s the essence of 2D!” Yekase grinned, a fox with a fan.