Yekase hauled Luo Jie onto the sofa. After wrestling for ages, she finally peeled off that sticky taffy clinging to her, then dropped into the seat opposite like a blade caught in its scabbard.

—Let’s make a bold assumption.

Take Luo Jie’s “doom of ruin” as real, or the talk stalls like a boat stuck in mud. If it’s a lie, I’ll have to spot the cracks in her words, like hairline fractures in ice.

“Then I’m going to start asking.”

Yekase wore a severe face, hurricane calm before the storm. Luo Jie, though, was lit up with hype and hope, like a fan who just heard the secret password at a con, fist pumping a little victory.

“Mm—so mom-coded. I used to watch from the sidelines. Finally I get to be the defendant.”

“Don’t be happy about that,” Yekase said, pausing to sort her thoughts like cards. “What year did you come back from?”

“That’s a prohibited item.”

“Am I dead in the future?”

“That’s a prohibited item.”

…

……

“Uh?”

Hold on. Aren’t you here to change the past and stop a doomed fate? What’s with the no comment?

“Uh, you really can’t say?”

“I can’t,” Luo Jie said, troubled, shoulders tucked like a sparrow in drizzle. “The spacetime perturbation rate is already near its boundary value…” Her fingers fidgeted at her chest, shy and small.

Fine. Ignore the term that exploded with info.

—Then let’s do it this way.

Yekase shifted into negotiation mode, heartbeat steady as a drum. She didn’t press with a direct ask. She raised one finger, voice leveled like a beam laid true.

“I’ll guess. You only need to nod or shake your head after each hypothesis to mark true or false. If the question feels too vague, too frequent, or you just don’t want to answer, no reaction is fine. But remember—this is all to change the future you saw.”

……

Luo Jie was silent a beat, eyes dark as the surface of a lake. Then she asked, “Is the little aunt interested too?”

Yekase glanced back. Liu RuoYuan stood behind her with arms folded, half leaning on the sofa like a willow against a wall.

“Finished the chores, got time to kill. I’ll just listen. Don’t mind me,” Liu RuoYuan said, smiling like a half-moon.

Luo Jie showed a hint of hesitation, a cloud passing over the sun.

“Alright—then I’ll begin.”

Yekase’s presence shifted like weather turning.

The probe had already begun before the first question ever left her lips.

On this point, she and her sister Liu RuoYuan needed no words. They moved in quiet harmony, like twin cranes circling the same thermals.

When Liu RuoYuan said she’d sit in, Luo Jie hesitated. That meant she understood this gentle-looking aunt saw sharper than Yekase, a born detective with eyes like a hawk.

Now tie that to her earlier not recognizing Ivaris. It grows very interesting, like finding a river under the sand.

Did Ivaris vanish one day in the future?

Even Yekase, seasoned in fighting Reverse Memes, would forget the partner who spliced genes into her? Forget so deeply that even when her daughter time-traveled back to save the world, she felt nothing?

With that thorn lodged under the skin, Yekase asked:

“First question: Is this doom an extinction-level disaster for humanity?”

“Yes!!!”

“A nod’s enough. Just nod.”

Luo Jie nodded so fast the air blurred behind it, like wings beating.

“Second question: Is whether I’m alive the key trigger for the doom?”

“…?!”

Panic flickered across Luo Jie’s face, brief as lightning behind clouds.

Then she shook her head.

“Alright. I understand.”

That question smuggled in the status she refused to answer. If “doom of ruin” equaled Yekase’s death, the answer would be a nod.

But she shook her head.

So a catastrophe of “humanity’s life or death” happens, and when it truly arrives, whether Yekase lives or dies isn’t even the pivot. The tide will rise regardless.

Then is the tragedy Ivaris’s disappearance? Unlikely. To disappear, one must have existed. Luo Jie doesn’t know Ivaris. How could she sense that vanishing and mark it as tragedy?

Like a mystery’s core trick finally showing its outline, the heart of it stood up in the fog.

Because “something was missing,” Yekase lost a critical battle, and then ushered in extinction with everyone—was that it?

“Third question—”

She moved to test that wild conjecture. Outside, sudden noise burst like a drumline.

All three went to the window. On the lawn of the Ambition Divine Ship, thick smoke boiled up like stormclouds from the ground. They looked up. The sky itself split open, a raw and shocking rift gouged like a wound.

No—not the sky. That was—

“The hemispherical sky-dome is expensive!”

Yekase screamed and fell to her knees, as if stabbed by an invoice.

“Pursuers…” Luo Jie murmured, and stepped out, calm like a blade leaving its sheath.

“Since they’re my tagalong hounds, I’ll handle it. Let Mom see what I can do!”

Yekase stared, dumbstruck, as Luo Jie pulled from the void a red, fork-shaped thing like an Ultraman-style changer. She didn’t recognize the device at all.

“Third question—are you an adult?” Liu RuoYuan asked out of nowhere, voice still water.

“No. I’m fifteen.”

The Liu sisters stayed in the house and shared a look. Understanding flashed between them like two lanterns answering in the dark.

The original third question didn’t need asking anymore.

Luo Jie knows Liu RuoYuan. Liu RuoYuan doesn’t want a minor on a battlefield. Yet future Yekase still gave Luo Jie power.

She’s only fifteen. Same age as Dorothy.

As a mother, Yekase would never let her fight. Same as with her own sister.

Yet both people Yekase tried to shield stepped onto a battlefield in the end. Maybe because Ivaris vanished, a gap in combat power opened like a missing brick in a wall?

“Is it ‘vanished,’ or ‘never appeared’?” Liu RuoYuan asked, voice soft as falling ash.

“…” Yekase said nothing, silence like frost.

In the yard, the smoke thinned like a torn veil.

A black-and-red mech emerged, raising a gun muzzle as dark as a cave.

Luo Jie didn’t flinch. Her voice rang like a bell at dawn:

“Dazzling entrance, a Hero Show that shakes the cosmos!”

Instantly, a waterfall of light drowned the floating-island deck, a flood that turned everything white as noon.

After an impossibly long millisecond drew tight, colorless references returned to normal. A surge of azure starlight bubbled up around the girl like fireflies, weaving a curtain that condensed into a body.

“ROAR——!!”

It sounded as if it came from the far side of the universe, a storm-bellow rolling across constellations.

It was a dragon.

Its whole body was woven from light, shaped in deep azure. Along its edges glinted a red hue—the breath of Flash Energy. A thousand stars fell into its eyes, twin spiraling galaxies that never slept. The changer was fixed at the tip of its tail, a blade fine as a thorn.

“My dome… my dome…” Yekase sobbed, voice breaking like thin ice.

Ivaris, sulking as she was, felt that uproar upstairs and came down to the first floor, a dark comet returning.

“What’s going on—”

“Now—let’s change the future!”

The dragon of light and the black mech were matched in size, two titans on a sky-lake. Luo Jie deliberately pulled it away from the Ambition Divine Ship, sold a feint, and dragon and machine tangled in the high air like hawks locked in a spiral.

“…I think I’ve got the picture,” Yekase said, red-eyed and raw.

Liu RuoYuan handed her a napkin, white square like a truce flag. “Luo Jie probably comes from a future where humanity was destroyed. But likely not the future of our worldline.”

“Like a Cosmic Bubble?” Ivaris pressed, voice steady as stone.

No wonder she said she used Infinite Power to punch the event light cone. She must have escaped from a Cosmic Bubble, slipping through a membrane like a fish through reeds.

“My death isn’t the turning point,” Yekase added, eyes on the storm outside. “If on that worldline I’m basically insignificant—and combine that with her not knowing you…”

“You never won the bet with Lalabel. You never even started the chain of events in this world.”

“Bingo.”

A Yekase who never reclaimed her memories—she’d already met Ling Yi by then, so she’d still try to be a hero. But could her mind hold? Her ideals and dreams erased by Reverse Memes, reduced to a ragged corporate drone. Dragged forward by Ling Yi, haunted by a sense of something forgotten—nightmares she couldn’t see, mist slipping past her fingers. What would she become?

She would carry those “fatal lacks” like stones in her shoes, stumbling down the same road. She would turn hysterical and martyr-like, pulling her sister and daughter onto the front lines. When the disaster arrived, she’d lose—like an eco-sword missing two pearls, a blade that couldn’t sing.

Following that thought to its edge, Yekase stared at the mech fighting Luo Jie. The longer she looked, the more familiar it felt, like recognizing an old tune inside a storm.

How could it be?

Luo Jie’s stance wasn’t “a Magical Girl turned into dragon-form.” It was the movement of a dragon utterly at home in its own bones. Four limbs, sharp teeth, killing claws, a tail supple as silk—all flowed through combat like water down a stair.

She bit at the mech’s shoulder. The mech raised an arm-shield to jam her jaws. But that was the point. Her smooth, slender tail traced a graceful arc and whipped the mech at its soft side—where the armor was thinnest.

A waist with almost no armor. Very much a Yekase design.

Then came a claw straight to the head.

A head like a single-soldier visor cracked along several lines. As the mech accelerated and turned, pieces with no anchor tumbled away like shale.

“Wh—”

Behind the shattered half of the headplate, an old human face showed.

Even from this distance, even under wrinkles and the dulling of the eyes, Yekase recognized her instantly. The name rose like a ghost on her tongue:

“Bai… Lu?”