A Magical Girl in brocade, spiked club in hand, looked like a festival lantern hiding a demon face, and she menaced a frail old man like a winter reed.

The grandpa she attacked held no weapon, only a pair of bicycle tires for a makeshift shield, like life buoys in a gray sea.

Anywhere else, this snapshot would be scandal front-page, a thunderclap over breakfast tables.

Look closer, though: the old man stood like morning tai chi in a dew-wet park, yet each sweep of the club met a tire’s timely spin that bled the force away like wind off bamboo, and any sudden thrust snagged in the spokes and stuck like thorns in a bird’s wing.

“What an odd-arm school of weapons—sharp stuff!”

It was force-dissipation, and not street-trick level, but temple-grade.

Yekase lay off to the side, quiet as a stone under moss; if those crystal-blue colossal eyes weren’t just cosmetic glass, she’d have seen the man called Dr Ika looked nothing like his public portrait—zero overlap, the kind of mismatch that would make an adviser tell you to plagiarize more.

Is that photo you?

It’s me—back when spring clouds were low.

Doesn’t look like you at all.

Sure; I’ve aged short and crooked like an old pine.

Like Yekase and the “Dr Ika” on the news, these media portraits must be sketched by feel; how do those reporters sleep, not fearing the target will hire knives in the night.

Thankfully he still wore his signature trench coat and suit, like a faded banner on an old wall; otherwise they’d never guess this crabby elder once stood near the summit of Infinite Power.

Ivaris and Dr Ika traded fifty exchanges, heat rising like a kiln; one side a steel-browed heroine, the other a hawk-backed elder, neither giving an inch.

Iron staff struck iron wheel, sparks flew like fireflies, a hard gale burst, sweeping the floor clean within a few steps like an autumn rake.

Yekase felt their levels climb in lockstep, like left foot stepping on right foot to climb air, and she marveled that Ivaris truly earned the Twenty Second Squad’s only tigress—never to her face—and she began to worry for the whale shark’s life.

So big a fish is rare as a comet; Mind Energy can refit flesh, but at this scale, with no glitch, there might be gene-deep twists under the tide.

“Wind! Rain! Come harder!” Dr Ika fought like a storm loving its own thunder.

A laser would drop him like a felled tree, but Ivaris wouldn’t kill outright—his identity holds secrets, and a laser might wound the whale shark; if it raged, the nearby Origin Dragon Palace could suffer a tidal accident.

But if they kept grinding, their power would climb beyond what the whale shark could bear, like waves gnawing through a cliff—sooner or later.

“Any way to make him lucid? Logistics Captain, throw me a rope!”

“Thinking!”

If it was organic damage to his neurons, Mind Energy might mend the torn net; but a Dr Ika here, even Ling Yi would smell a plot—Shadow Curtain International infighting, or a lab mishap—no easy cure in a storm like this; still, they could act now.

“Do what I said—feed Flash Energy into his chest spiral, opposite its twist!”

“On it!”

Ivaris drew two short lasers that sang like cicadas, shredded the right-hand bicycle wheel to scrap, slid through the gap like a knife through silk, and slammed a Flash Energy palm dead center on the whirl.

Thump.

From the touchpoint came torque, like a hidden screw biting flesh.

“?!”

Ivaris felt the ground drop; in a blink she got yanked up and spun along the spiral, like laundry in a drum under winter sun.

“What a high energy level?”

How much is packed in there—an Ascender’s load? No, only his chest shows Infinite Power; the rest is quiet as stone.

She tasted the barrel roll, finally catching the pattern like a bird catching a warm current.

“The Ascender… isn’t him. It’s someone else—”

Some unknown Ascender of Spiral Force left this unhealing wound like a shark hook; ceaseless pain cracked his mind, and he washed up here.

A clean execution would anger the headquarters flock; better let him rot on a rock, or stage a neat “accident”—a sea myth swallowing him during island convalescence, and the tide keeps its secrets.

If Spiral Force drove him mad, then stop the spin, and he might speak between waves.

Ivaris planted a boot on the whale shark’s stomach wall like a climber on wet cliff, reset her stance, tore his shirt open at the chest with the palm still pouring Flash Energy like a red river.

“Ooooh—!”

Crimson flowed skin-deep then within, carving anti-spiral marks like counter-grain, shading the invisible with a red glaze.

But why—

“My Flash Energy… is growing?”

Ivaris stared, heart hammering like a drum.

She was outputting at full flood; normally these few seconds would blast a street into a gravel riverbed.

Yet her well didn’t drain; it deepened.

Spiral Force… turning into Flash Energy?

In the collision, the two Infinite Powers—close kin at the physics root—began to braid like twin vines; quantity tipped into quality.

The once-clear Spiral Force flashed into deep azure, and it danced with Ivaris’s cherry-red Flash Energy like spring and pomegranate.

Green spectrum.

Because Simmons, the discoverer of Spiral Force, refused to play court, that color line got hijacked by the schemers behind Neptune Energy, and it lost the last trickle of traffic.

A red-green vortex lifted off his skin like hot air, burst outward in a noon-bright flare, and flung Ivaris to the floor like a leaf.

“Arghhh—”

Dr Ika arched up and let out a sound like a lion’s roar mixed with a stag’s scream, and distant whale-song answered from all sides like canyon echoes.

The flashlight glow swelled in a breath and became a pillar that speared the dim gut like a lighthouse beam.

In its heart, Dr Ika slowly closed his eyes and murmured, “The rumble from afar… has gone quiet… I can finally sleep, like a boat at anchor…”

The “ground” heaved and tilted; seawater rushed in like a broken sluice.

The whale shark felt the fight in its belly at last, and it began to writhe like a netted giant.

“Help— I’m rolling—”

Yekase had peeked with Infinite Force Perception halfway, then ducked back into dark because the power glare was knife-bright; with no limbs to brace, the tilting floor made her tumble like a gourd down steps.

Ivaris reached into the beam, fingers fishing for the half-lost Dr Ika, and she yelled without looking at the rolling Yekase, “Quit the act already! Cast Levitation!”

“It’s called the Levitation Spell! Celestial Speech, Le—glub!”

Her sister-made OCD flared; she corrected the term before chanting, and a stray scrap clipped her head; that half-beat sent her splashing.

Splash!

She bobbed back up like a cork.

The mask kept brine out, and the spell still took; yet damn it, can’t a girl have one clean play—anger flared like oil, and Yekase began to stack layers, ready to break shell.

“Your Infinite Power is blinding—I can’t see! Secure him. I’m punching out first!”

Ivaris swore like thunder over hills, “Toy-rotted brain! Deserting now—call that hero work?!”

“I’ll keep it from ramming the city—”

Yekase’s voice cut off like a string snapped.

Dewa Komahime could “get used to it” and let a human brain handle star-scar torrents; and Yekase, the closest of all humans to the marrow of evolution, walked into that singular ridge right now.

Spiral Force as catalyst, senses shut by accident, billions of cells hunted a path like fish schooling toward light.

She crossed what a lineage spends ten thousand years to climb, in one held breath.

Evolution is enumeration.

Savage trial and error, pain like sleet, desperate mutations like sparks in ash,

Rise, fall, survival, extinction, reshuffle like tides through seasons.

Each cell became a clan, each organ a species, finding the fittest mix for the weather, then pushing the whole body into its next epoch; the refresh ran as fast as nerve-lightning, and it never once stopped.

…

Found it.

The final form of Infinite Force Perception glowed at the pineal “Third Eye,” like a star behind eyelids.

She felt water drops cling and break like tiny drums, Flash and Spiral coiling like a double helix chain, broken machines dissolving in gastric acid like frost on iron, intact machines ticking their last notches, Ivaris’s breath like a bellows, the whale shark’s long moan like foghorns in a night bay.

It wasn’t noise; every sound was string-vibration of basic particles, a rain of notes.

Then Yekase found a contour like herself now—another racing mermaid cutting black water.

She must’ve woken to this battle; from deeper in the stomach, she rode the rushing tide and arrowed for the whale shark’s mouth, swift as a kingfisher.

So fast it mocked the current, so fast it mocked biology.

Why is there a mermaid here?

Why does she carry an Idler Sigil’s trace like the one at the Hot Spring Villa, etched faint as incense smoke?

With the Third Eye open, Yekase stepped across the Reverse Meme; she needed no clever detours to perceive, and every byte of the world greeted her like an old friend at a teahouse.

…That mermaid is wrong.

Tight restraints like iron vines, a false face like lacquer, a ruined body like a storm-wrecked boat—enough to blur anyone, no need for another Idler Sigil fog.

She must catch her.

But how? That speed was a multi-stage booster roaring over waves; Yekase’s pace—

“…My pace… can’t match? Maybe… it can.”

The thought arrived like dawn; her body turned light as smoke, her legs fused to a tail that whipped with steel strength.

Two black shadows shot against the current like swallows, and in a blink they speared into the whale shark’s esophagus and vanished into the throat’s night.