“The Chubu family?!” Crimson Field blurted.

After the fight, Yekase took the Stellar Crown from Crimson Field and handed it right back to Chubu Risa. Her temperament settled like wind over a lake. Or—maybe the version without that auxiliary brain was her true baseline. She confessed to Yekase that the L.I.S.E. system was her secret, years-in-the-making core A.I., and that “Chubu Risa” was a name she’d ridden with the current. In their world, everyone who swims in shadow carries spare names like spare knives. For a born introvert, even more so. Yekase got it.

Yekase had her own shy edges, but a rare hard streak in her nature made her stake out presence with words and deeds. She wore unpredictability like a lab coat, the persona of a “genius you can’t pin down,” because it gave her the tempo in any conversation. Face someone she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—pressure, though, and she’d curl up small.

Risa’s voice turned to business, flat as a stamped form:

“The Representative Battle goes to the Crimson Field house. Most fighters in the Special Zone were temps. Only the two branch-family officers leading them were your kin. They can’t kick up a real storm. So the spoils fall to Akano Souu, the MVP, and to you, who crashed the party after… The main bloodline’s finished. No main versus branch anymore.”

“So the winner’s cut is…”

“Chubu Planetary Tech will shelter the mother and daughter, and we’ll fund your mother’s palliative care.”

“…! Thank you. Truly!”

“Don’t thank me. It’s a deal.” Her tone had no warmth, like snow on steel.

“So go with an easy heart, Wandering Phoenix.”

Yekase smiled. Then, quick as a falcon stooping, she reached over Risa’s head and plucked the Stellar Crown free.

Risa vanished.

Looking down, they found her crouched on the floor, both hands over her head, words tumbling out in a thin, rapid stream: “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—it’s my mistake to talk big when I’m on the losing side—I’ll honor Representative Battle rules and transfer seventy percent of assets to the Crimson Field Group. The agreement will be ready for your review in three days—”

“Right. That.” Yekase waved airily. “I’m very into her planet-scale machinery. If funding gets yanked, the follow-up R&D gets tricky. Could our newly minted Crimson Field matriarch be merciful and let Chubu Tech stay intact? We’ll shut down every munitions line. All of them.”

The private handshake deal clicked into place like a shoji door.

Akano Shouha took one last, long look at the little house. She pressed down the brim of her straw hat, then turned and walked into a street poured full of summer sunlight.

Perched on the roof’s edge, Yekase sat cross-legged and watched her go. A flicker of déjà vu brushed her like a moth’s wing.

Why?

Maybe, in some time she couldn’t remember, she’d seen someone else off like this. Maybe she was always sending someone away.

She might be a Longlifer now, but she hadn’t lived centuries. Partings still scraped raw. Maybe they always would. She tried to convince herself that meant she was still human. After the old creed—cute girls don’t poop—she finally found herself a new mental stabilizer.

Then she followed Risa onto the helicopter.

The bird was a big boss’s private ride. Yekase counted her life’s mentors and patrons on her fingers. Only Alicia Alicia’s magic flying bed could compare, and that thing looked positively shabby next to this. The rest—looking at you, Sandryon—didn’t even have a flying bed. They had to jury-rig their own way skyward.

But from another angle, those women were the least warped by capital… Even as she thought it, Yekase didn’t buy it.

Ivaris lounged into the leather couch like a cat into sunlight. She plucked a cherry from the table and didn’t remove the stem, just held it between her lips like a blade of wild grass.

“Don’t play with your food.”

Yekase tugged off the stem and flicked it into the trash.

Ivaris pouted. “Then I’ll play with you?”

“I mean… I won’t say no…”

Ahem. Risa cleared her throat—loud and long—and sat in a single armchair.

Ivaris pressed a hand to her heart, full of theatrical pain. “They say tying a cherry stem with your tongue boosts dexterity. I work this hard only to make you feel good, and you can’t see my devotion…”

Cough cough cough! Risa broke into violent hacking.

“What’s wrong, caught a cold?” Yekase leaned over, sincere.

“I’m fine. Can we talk business?”

“What business?” Ivaris hooked an arm around Yekase’s waist and flopped them both onto the couch. “I’m taking my wife on a honeymoon. That’s top priority.”

“Since when am I the wife? Greasy!”

“You didn’t mind when I called you darling.”

“‘Wife’ feels way more real!”

Risa’s eye twitched. “…I can book a hot spring ryokan and a guide. Does that work for you two?”

“Hot spring, yes. Guide, no. We like getting lost together.” Ivaris block-parried Yekase’s dramatic little punches with her chest. “Right, wife?”

“Uh-huh. Right.”

Yekase knew. This woman’s cheesiness had no ceiling. Sometimes she suspected Ivaris ditched Britain’s palace life for Huaxia because her rustic charm couldn’t run free at court.

Silent warrior, Sailor Saturn.

“Fine, fine.” Risa surrendered.

The helicopter skimmed over the chain of cities strung along Honshu’s southern coast and arrowed toward Japan’s most famous wonder, Mount Fuji.

Its peak wore snow year-round, a white cap on a blue-black cone. The very tip looked knocked off, like someone had chipped a teacup. Bald, more like a straw hat than a crown—that was the quiet crater.

Yekase rubbed the top of her own head, instinctive.

“If you love that limited-edition straw hat so much, why’d you give it away?”

“I bet it on the future…”

“Then throw in an arm while you’re at it.”

“Hey, the mood was there. Between friends, you don’t nickel-and-dime.” Yekase watched the snowcap, and the structures that emerged as they closed in. “Iva, you saw all of it, right? Tell me… did I see someone off like this once, too? Is that why ‘this time’ feels like something’s missing, why I handed over a treasure even though it hurt?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew it.”

…

Risa frowned.

Why’d they stop there? Isn’t this where you ask who that person was and cue a tale sealed under dust?

But Yekase looked satisfied. She pressed her cheek to the window and drank in Fuji.

“Hey, Risa,” she said suddenly.

“What?”

“What are those buildings on the summit? Observatory?”

“Oh, that’s our destination. The volcano hot spring inn. Fuji’s an active volcano. It hasn’t erupted in centuries, but there’s enough geothermal under the skin for a few springs. The Fujiwara clan started collecting data and hauling materials ten years ago. We finished it the past two.”

A hot spring in the crater. And a Fujiwara project.

“Is this… hot spring safe?” Yekase hedged.

In every sense…

“It isn’t, actually. Only people with reinforced bodies can check in. You two are fine, right?”

So it really wasn’t safe!

“Sounds fun.” Ivaris was already itching. “Some ideas only Japanese minds hatch. Didn’t you lot nuke Hokkaido yourselves once? First, second, third in human history to eat the mushroom cloud, and the first to plant it on your own turf!”

“That was a sympathetic detonation. Sympathetic…”

The outfit that tried to grow a mushroom on their own base—blowing half of Hokkaido into the sea—had died to the last man. Nothing to do with Risa. But for the dignity of the Yamato nation—and to keep one freak case from warping the country’s image—she still argued. Whether it helped, who knew.

The helicopter settled onto the inn’s rooftop.

The skid kissed the H-marked pad, and the air changed. The cold near freezing melted at once, not into summer’s swelter, but into a precise, crafted warmth.

“The Fujiwara onmyoji aren’t fighters,” Risa said. “They study ways to blend with heaven and earth. They imprint spring’s mountain weather—temperature, humidity, scenery—into talismanic arrays. Then project a collective illusion here at the summit.”

Really? Yekase thought of the little box in her teleport case. Okay, hypnosis isn’t combat either…

“What if someone prefers the true summit view?”

“Rooms have clarity talismans. Stick one on and the illusion fades.”

“Very humane.”

Risa pulled a pig-snouted gas mask from under her seat and strapped it on. Only then did she push open the door.

A woman in a chestnut yukata, face veiled, waited on the roof like a still tea painting. “What rare guests! Boss, it’s been, what, half a year since your last visit?”

“This is Madam Fujiwara Nozomi,” Risa said over her shoulder. The Stellar Crown above her brow blinked like a tiny star. “I’ve been busy. Final pre-launch testing for L.I.S.E.”

“Going well?”

“It went live. Then it failed. The learning depth’s still too shallow. It can fight. It can’t do anything else.” Risa complained in front of Yekase on purpose, watching her out of the corner of her eye.

The proprietress saw Yekase and Ivaris in the cabin and greeted them with a smile and a nod.

Yekase hopped down after Risa. “Every mech on the market is a fighter chassis. Engineering frames? A handful of shops, and all of them can swap to emergency combat. You set your system loose online; of course it only learned fight logic. It doesn’t have the right corpus.”

“Mmm. True…”

“Hehe, you three didn’t come here to do office talk, right?” Madam Fujiwara caught Ivaris’s darkening look and gently cut the impromptu seminar short. She drew three talisman slips from her sleeve.

“Busy season. Anyone you’d rather not run into? We can blur your identities for the sake of everyone’s refined fun.”

“Someone I don’t want to run into?” Yekase echoed.

“You’d hate to soak in a pool and watch your sworn enemy stroll in naked, right?” Risa pressed a talisman to her forehead. The yellow strip touched skin and flared, crumbling to ash.

Her whole aura flexed. She felt like a stranger—though Yekase wasn’t that familiar with her to begin with. Maybe that helped the charm take root.

“We’re good. New place, new faces. Running into an enemy would be a miracle.”

Yekase didn’t mind. The proprietress didn’t push. She led them inside to check in.