Yekase, twenty-eight. Bachelor in Electrical Automation from Twin Towers Institute of Technology. Dropped out in eleventh grade at Heavenly Heart High School. Mechanic, Infinite Power engineer, Ancient Alchemist.

This year had carved new lines into her, like wind etching sand.

Since the Lantern Festival execution, she showed up less and less, her shadow thinning like mist at dawn.

Aside from fights where a slip meant blood, she handed off the trivial, like leaves drifting to other hands.

She slowed her temper and drew in stained allies, and she let fame and loss wash past like rain.

She almost stopped calling herself a desk worker, that shell shedding like old bark.

She started choosing tailored dresses, and her small habits softened, like tea cooling in a porcelain cup.

But she put away the line she used to keep on her lips—“to be a lamp in the night”—not because she gave up, but because one sentence no longer soothed the storm.

Ling Yi woke her from a six-year nightmare, like a bell cutting fog; Lalabel helped her find the girl she had been, like a kite pulled back to hand. From negative she clawed to the first zero, and from zero she stepped toward one.

She already knew herself, had become herself, and accepted her masks and hungers, her bright and her flawed—yet one cloud still hid the moon.

“Yekase” was missing its last puzzle piece, a shard like flint in the grass.

She remembered Dr Ika’s nights, the “Infiltrator” chewing the ring-road’s empty overpass, its tires circling like a grinding prayer. The mentors who died for ratios followed like silhouettes on wet glass.

In those first months of flight, Magical Girl Icarus shot through late autumn from Twin Towers City to the North China Plain, letting the cold lock every loose thought like ice on reeds, until only one primitive spark remained:

Then… add. Some. Speed.

Right—so that was it, the key under the mat.

Who taught you to street-race?

I was born knowing, like a wolf knowing snow. I don’t know.

The beast in her heart had never left, lying under the floorboards like a furnace—“by our reason, the mercy born of reason, and the dignity that stands because of both,” she forged three chains to bind herself, and felt no guilt for iron. But the beast still crouched there; beasts don’t evaporate.

Stripped of bright lacquer, she knew she was a common human greedy for sensation, like anyone who loves spice and speed. Beyond the flesh’s hunger, there was one way she’d ignored for too long—a way she had practiced in sky and on land, but not yet conquered at sea.

“If I add speed—what happens?”

“Unknown mermaid, hello—”

“And then—I’m going to outrun you!”

…

…

Two shadows threaded a current that never slept, like knives through silk.

Racing mermaids, jailed in gelatin walls, didn’t crave victory; fear of punishment made their tails beat, like drums hit by order. The severe, permanent restraint would shatter a normal mind like glass under a hammer. Only the gifted optimists, the ones “born to be mermaids,” dreamed of that fog-shrouded redemption at the end of a Triple Crown.

So most racing mermaids were just shells that knew how to flick a tail, empty lanterns in a storm. The crowd that loved this cruel pantomime were high officers in the Sinister Organization, their tastes like rust on iron.

But the two mermaids today swam with a different heat, like embers under ash.

The one leading had her chest name tag smeared to a blur, letters drowned like ink in rain. Unlike Yekase, she hadn’t cheated to steal back hearing and speech. She fell into a dead silence for nights without count, sank into a whale shark’s stomach like a coin in pitch, and still she lived, stubborn as pine in winter.

What had she suffered? What did she seek? Where did she want to go?

…Was that… important?

Yekase, hunter of truth, didn’t know why her heart asked that, like a reed bowing to wind. She only knew that if she and Ivaris stopped this nameless mermaid by force, even tearing off the suit with Flash Energy, the woman would say nothing.

Because the way she swam forward—was so clean and joyful, like a horn in clear air.

She was truly savoring speed, savoring water skimming her lateral line, like silk over a blade. For a racing mermaid stripped of everything, this was the last pleasure, and one a human body could never taste.

And she was using spirit to accelerate. Japanese onmyoji weave a power that mixes Soul Power and Sorcery, a history stitched from east and west; elsewhere, other crafts don’t use it. Yekase could mimic the flavor, but tuning that nature was slow and thorny.

She is an onmyoji… she was an onmyoji, a title now sunk like a lost bell.

From a noble onmyoji to a toy, and yet she enjoyed the ocean’s gallop, like a horse let out at dawn?

The Third Eye and the sonar sang together, and Yekase read every ripple like script. The wounded whale shark fled for the Pacific’s deeper blue. Ivaris hauled Dr Reaper toward the surface, his fate a coin on edge. Origin Dragon Palace went to high alert, and two squads in dive suits with stun guns waited like statues with lightning.

Yekase poured Flash Energy into her fins, but she still sat three or four body lengths behind, tugged like a kite in a bad wind.

…What was wrong?

The throttle was buried to the floor, yet the gap stayed, like a splinter that wouldn’t come out.

Could Flash Energy be a worse acceleration than that mixed spirit? No way; that door was closed like stone.

Then why—

…

…Maybe because she lacked a reason to win, a fire for the finish.

Back in her wage-slave days, Yekase loved street-racing, but she just loved speed, wind on her face, rain on the visor—no reason and no drive to be “first.” Effort and reward stayed mismatched, like scales with a broken arm.

But this mermaid was different.

In its—her—life, only this remained, one star in a black sky.

Normal mermaid races go against the current, like airliners taking off into wind. Tailwind adds wild speed you can’t control, accidents rising like lightning in a summer storm.

But the nameless mermaid ignored the risk of smashing against submarines and reefs, bone to gravel, and she rode the flow. She pulled Yekase into the river like a hawk yanking a ribbon.

In the Hokkaido maelstrom, so vast you could see it from low orbit with the naked eye, Soul Power and Flash Energy both had their thrust thinned, like wine watered to pink. Even so, that didn’t explain her lead.

Was there a difference in the way they swam, a craft in the wrists?

…!

On the third lap, Yekase finally saw it, a needle glint in foam.

Her body’s angle, always against the current—kept a subtle slant, like a door left barely ajar.

Not perfectly perpendicular. Tilted slightly outward, just a breath, a whisper.

That tiny angle widened the force area by more than double, turning the current into a hard hand pushing her forward, like a god’s palm behind the spine.

But if you do that, can a body bear that hammering for long? How long till things tear like paper?

Even the nameless mermaid might not know. Inside the whale shark, pacing like a ghost in a red cave, she stumbled on another racing mermaid. She just wanted a verdict, to measure sky with sky.

Her past as onmyoji, her past as a human woman—did that matter?

If only speed remains, only speed, even forced speed—then a racing mermaid wears fate like a seal on silk.

Racing mermaids don’t need sight or hearing or touch or speech or thought. They’re empty shells built by the Sinister Organization, pitiful and precise. But when the soul inside them is a soul that chases speed, they become the purest crystal of that desire.

When such a soul resonates with another soul chasing speed, the Soul part inside her Soul Power unwinds like silk and wakes the true blade.

A super-type fighter, single-hearted and honest to herself, is born like thunder.

“Haha… this is deranged. I’m not this—”

Yekase’s mouth tilted in a wry smile under the mask, words feather-light, and then the curve froze like ice snapping.

…Soul Power is the will to understand, a lantern held to another’s face.

And she was the one who understood the nameless mermaid, and drew out her hidden light like a string pulled from a bow.

People strong in Soul Power often go a little mad, like bats in bright noon—because resonant minds link together, strand to strand. Without active control, it’s like waking with a borrowed personality. A mecha pilot in history, gifted like a comet, even resonated with minds without Soul Power; he tumbled into madness young, and vanished like a ship in fog.

Now fresh Soul Power surged from the mermaid, will and senses braided inside it, and poured into Yekase’s awareness like a river bursting its banks.

—?!

Yekase’s main defense against psychic attack was logic, spine-straight and dry. Against this brute tide she had no shield. She jolted, a drunk hit by a bell, and her head emptied to a single point of light.

Surpass her.

No matter what, surpass her, like a spear pushed through a wall.

On a road with wheels or in the sky with wings, Yekase had tricks to squeeze more speed from muscle and metal. But swimming—she knew nothing. Today she was a bystander challenging a veteran who had married the sea.

Even if she passed her, so what? If she didn’t, so what?

Aimless competitiveness is empty vanity, a paper crown. It insults those who truly chase victory, like dust in a shrine.

Yekase thought she lacked that itch. In the dark under that thought, she refused to admit the premise of resonance: both minds must share the same flame. If she truly had zero interest in winning, then zero times infinity stays zero, blank ink on a blank page.

A game streamer once said:

Even if I reincarnate a thousand times, I still can’t roast this marshmallow right. Which means, I’m still me.

She was the pale comet that cut winter 2022, a star that turned hard and then refracted seven colors through the year’s grind, diamond to rainbow. But she was still herself, the corporate drone who used optical camouflage to street-race and dodge fines, laughing like wind through wire.

She… maybe, just a little… wanted to win, a small coal under ash.

There was still something she could do, a lever she hadn’t pulled.

The suit’s outer layer was knife- and bullet-proof to stop rescues, but inside it didn’t need walls. You could break it outward like pushing a reed through a thin crust. Yekase grew fins along her body, stabbing through the gel and tasting water like metal on the tongue.

Pectoral, pelvic, anal, caudal. Finally, from her right arm’s place rose a dorsal fin—broad as a banner in a storm.

Next, her chest deflated like a punctured ball, and her whole frame flattened like a true fish, tipping ninety degrees sideways. The change completed like ink sealing a signature.

She became a sailfish—one of the fastest fish on earth, a streak under surf.

No longer a rubber-costume roleplay, but a human “evolving” into a fish—a twisted line, yes, but one that still mapped a reality.

…

—Then the ocean shivered.

In the Hokkaido maelstrom churned by the whale shark’s rampage, a scarlet tore open the blue, a wound like a flower.

—!!

The nameless mermaid, who had been nothing but forward, deaf like a broken sonar, finally reacted, like a deer pricking ears.

She turned her head a fraction, a petal’s width—

In her empty, iced darkness, a light bloomed, like a lantern behind paper.

Was it a flame, or a bolt of lightning?

No. It was a pair of eyes, blood-red and bright, like rubies wet with storm.

A mermaid shouldn’t “see” anything—neither substance nor energy, neither cloud nor knife—

Thunder cracked, mountains in the water.

A sharp crimson line carved the sea’s gloom, splitting the dark that caged her, though that was beside the point, like wind after a drum.

She heard it, but only one line reached her, like a bell striking bone.

It wasn’t Yekase’s usual light, playful challenge, nor a gentle comfort for a victim, like warm tea on cold hands.

“Get—behind me!”