“I won’t accept a future stacked on bones!”

Crimson Field shouted a line she’d heard somewhere, cool as a sword at dawn, then beat her fire-wings and surged across the sky.

Yekase’s voice rose behind her, steady as rain on tin. “My Luciferin rolled off the line and never got a second mod. The core bay’s still spinning the corporate U99 pair Professor F shoved in last year. They’re twins, sure, but the output’s still not enough.”

“But you can make it evolve, right? Like a cicada shedding its shell.”

“Biology adapts within a tolerance band, like reeds bending in wind. Live-modding a mech? Eight out of ten, it blows up right here.”

“Got it. I wasn’t planning to pull punches anyway.”

Crimson Field hefted the greatsword one-handed, drew a card from empty air like silk tugged out of night, and swiped it down the spine of the blade.

[Survive!]

Wrapped in a charge like a comet, she arrowed for the Star-Scar Mech-Knight.

Yekase, left behind, confirmed the core loops were humming, then shaped Flash Energy into tendrils like glowing roots. They slipped through layer after layer of armor to the heart, brushing pistons, lines, axles, and the most fragile rotor.

A pessimist hears “eighty percent it explodes here” and sees a cliff. An optimist hears “twenty percent it won’t” and sees a bridge. She was about to turn that statistical twenty into a carved-in-stone hundred.

Crimson Field dove into the low-altitude brawl with no time to plan with Ivaris, storm tight in her chest. One look was enough. Ivaris dropped melee, fell back thirty meters, and took over the suppression Yekase had been running.

Eleven floating cannons ringed her like a halo of knives, facing a war-class mech nearly a hundred meters long.

Star-Scar neither knew nor cared about their split. The “Lamplight” it had fired snapped back into place like a boomerang. A steel hand the size of a townhouse clenched and swung for Ivaris.

Boom—!

Skimming up along the titan’s breastplate, Crimson Field glanced back and saw Star-Scar hadn’t even landed the hit. That blast wasn’t impact. It was a fist ripping the sound barrier like canvas.

Ivaris didn’t plan to dodge—maybe she couldn’t. She chose a newer ten-story, and alit on the roof like a kestrel on a post.

Punch-wind swept the rooftop bare like a typhoon, whirled her skirt and hair like banners, then pressed from above to grind her flat.

“Watch out—!!”

The last Magical Girl clenched her fist, a small sun caged in her palm.

“For an external mass your size—”

Charge. Step. Turn.

Picture the fist as whip and shell.

—Then swing with everything you’ve got!

“I already punched one your size ten years ago!!”

The clouds blew apart like curtains at dawn, and morning gold spilled down.

The whole building under Ivaris split into a black web, every window bursting at once, a diamond rain refracting wild color.

Crack, crack—craaaack…

From the knuckles, Lamplight’s frame crazed like brittle porcelain, spiderwebs running out until they reached Red Lotus and finally stalled.

Her lasers and Luciferin’s missiles had scuffed Star-Scar before, but they never bit deep. Only this clean, head-on cross-counter finally ruined a hand.

And Ivaris, swaying atop a skeletal frame of concrete and rebar…

“Haaah… hurts like hell.”

Her whole right arm had shredded into ribbons.

Blood so bright it glowed dropped, ruby beads on gray stone. The magic unwove—there was no whip, no cannon. Only will.

The same Flash Energy shows different colors in different hands, like fire through stained glass. Its nature shifts, too. If Yekase’s is gentle, late-game, a slow-build (beat), then Ivaris runs all in on output, a one-turn kill (OTK).

She used Behemoth Drive to spike her body to the ceiling, and at contact she flooded Star-Scar’s fist with Flash Energy. She changed the metal’s nature. She made it brittle.

Why not soften it?

Because soft can’t be shattered.

“Why… would you do that…” Crimson Field whispered, disbelief frosting the words.

That punch wouldn’t stop Star-Scar cold. It would definitely ruin her own combat power. She moved like a veteran—how could she misjudge the trade?

[—Crimson Field, who do you think is piloting that mech right now?]

Sound-Carry. Yekase still loved harmless little cantrips, air-borne as sparrow-song.

“Isn’t it Shuangyu?” Crimson Field asked the wind, knowing Yekase couldn’t hear.

With the time Ivaris bought, she finally cleared the chest that Firmament had reshaped.

She reached the head of the Vesper Star God-Engine itself, and saw a figure there, thin and small as a reed.

Wait—Shuangyu was already unconscious. Then who was steering Star-Scar?

[Right now I have two hypotheses.]

Yekase’s voice stayed unhurried, like chalk on a blackboard—not a battlefield brief, but two classmates working a proof.

[One, there’s a final authorization beyond the Stellar Crown. Chubu Risa lied to me so we’d fully cooperate with the mech test.]

[Because it’s absurd that Shuangyu could start a war-class mech with just the Stellar Crown—no password, no DNA check. You can’t handwave that as “we forgot.”]

[Two… inside that mech, some kind of “consciousness” has formed. Ivaris is testing if a counterintuitive move can scramble its logic.]

[Because Chubu Risa barely knows us. She has no reason to risk the Special Combat Zone’s monster fines to murder us. No profit, no motive, no need.]

“Consciousness? How could a robot have consciousness—”

Yekase kept wrenching on the ground, hands flicking like rain on iron. Ivaris had bought nearly a minute of stun and forced its tactics into pure bullet hell. Now it was Crimson Field’s turn.

She stopped overthinking. She raised the greatsword and chopped at the joint between Star-Scar’s head and torso.

Phoenix fire burned hot as a white kiln, a laser that refused to fade. Flames clung in the cut, eating outward to widen the wound.

Good effect. Keep hitting. Don’t stop—

Star-Scar slowly turned its head.

It looked at Crimson Field as she stepped back to change her angle.

Those cyan eyes—just cameras—seemed to flash a thread of red, like a coal waking.

Like a giant beast fixing on her, icewater poured down her spine.

Crimson Field loved mecha anime. She’d seen a special control system once.

Build a base A.I. in the OS. Let it learn kindness by living with the pilot, and malice by fighting day after day, until that assistant program grows a complex “soul.”

Its name was…

Logistic and Inconsequence Self-cognitive Equipment, L.I.S.E—also called the LISE system.

“Chubu Risa”—was that the hint all along?

[That mech’s circuits are too vast. Redundant information settles everywhere like silt, naturally forming deep-learning loops—and such loops are the necessary condition for a machine to grow a soul.]

“A machine’s soul… does it really exist?!”

[Luciferin, maintenance complete!]

[I’m returning to the fight!]

From gut to skin refit, Luciferin rose from the ruins. Four banks of thrusters and new turbine wings lit one by one, blowing white fire as its feet left the ground.

The long-lost commentary rang from every side again:

[Quack! Luciferin stands again! It—it’s changed shape! Those wings—that’s the Heaven-Thunder Azeus! Azeus has possessed it!]

[The ultimate trump of the human line, Heaven-Thunder Azeus, that shone in the life-or-death war ten years ago! To face a berserk doomsday engine, it returns from the far shore of the void, and stands upon the earth once more!]

They really do go full dramatic overdrive… speechless.

Even a genius like Yekase couldn’t conjure an Azeus by hand. Otherwise all those sleepless engineers back then would be a joke. She’d just refreshed engines and loops, and while fixing the outer armor, slapped on turbine wings modeled after Azeus.

“Crimson Field, what’s your move?” Yekase asked. “Your fire works. If we keep this up, we can break Star-Scar apart and pull Shuangyu free. The cost is that nascent soul in the robot will vanish. It doesn’t know right from wrong, and no one will know if it ever existed.”

“An illusory mind, an engineered newborn soul—can you accept a future built on its sacrifice?”

By wildlife rules, we’d put it down on sight for this damage… but Yekase burned to see how its loops had grown. That part, she kept to herself.

—A robot’s soul.

To be honest, Crimson Field still half-believed, half-doubted. But ignore it, and she felt they’d lose some crucial possibility, like grinding a seed underfoot.

“…I don’t accept it! I won’t give up before I try! Phoenix fire is the Flame of Return—if I was given something this precious, and I can’t save every life I want to save, what’s the point!”

Crimson Field sheathed the greatsword and tried to disengage. She drifted straight into a machine-gun line. She flung up a wall of flame, but couldn’t blunt all the force, and got hurled aside.

She caught herself midair, teeth set like a wolf, and shouted:

“—Doctor, open fire on me!”