Flora had always believed heroes existed, like lanterns burning steady in a storm.

Her father was taken by the Church Knights, and no capes cut through that iron tide. Her aunt burned before the crowd, and no blade cleaved that fire. Her mother was dragged off by an enforcer for a debt, and no shield broke the night.

Even so, her belief held, a candle stubborn against the wind.

She had proof: on the cusp of Redcastle Town’s purge, a dragon wrapped in iron and fire and a roaring soundtrack fell from the sky, crushed the knight squad, and saved everyone like thunder rolling back the dark.

That silhouette was beauty forged into power, majesty drawn in flame.

To Flora, that was how a hero should look—like a mountain with wings.

She didn’t think she could be a hero, and her pulse admitted it before her feet did. But comics swear heroes have one or two close supporters. Being someone’s support sounded right, like a hand steadying the ladder.

So, even with her mother’s hard refusal like ice on the door, she packed a bag and slipped away toward Arcadia City, chasing starlight through alleys.

She wanted the skill to be a support, the right to stand near a bright blade.

More than that, she wanted to meet her own hero, the way a river longs for the sea.

…Then classes started, and every day was Infinite Power charts by day, forge and lab benches by night, a metronome of steel and ink.

Do heroes spend their days doing this too, like hammers ticking beneath capes?

It’s a blind spot, after all: aside from saving the world, we never ask what heroes do between storms.

Heroes are people; they need wages and bread, a roof that doesn’t leak. Flora, set on being support, made worry-solving her job, like oiling a gear before the engine seizes. Tools must be repaired, households fed—skills stacked like bricks.

So, near semester’s end, on a weekend bright as brass, Flora headed into Arcadia’s thriving streets, hoping amid a tide of mages and mechanics to brush the cape, to catch a hero’s shadow in the crowd.

“…Called the City of a Thousand Cities, the City of Glory.” The voice drifted like a familiar bell. “Destroyed by an external entity five hundred years ago, erased from history, resurfaced half a year ago…”

Flora looked up. An Asian girl her age explained patiently to another girl, words like pebbles laid in a path. The listener’s hair blazed red and blue, a fire river in daylight.

Flora felt she had seen the speaker’s face in a hallway of steel and screens.

Arcadia Engineering Academy and Ivalice State University are tight-knit, sharing big courses, labs, and machine rooms like siblings passing tools.

She sifted memory like sand. The dyed-blonde Asian girl was one of Ivalice’s new prodigies, top three in theory across the program. She spoke at the joint commencement as student representative—first place had died suddenly, a winter gust in spring—and she was miles stronger than middle-of-the-pack Flora.

She was on break, drifting like a cloud too.

The red-blue-haired girl—was she a friend from out of town, a striking palette on cobblestone?

“Mom, what’s that?”

“That’s an orphanage, your Aunt Lu Yao started it.” The answer set down gently, like a teacup.

“So it began even back then…”

…Huh?

Did she just say “Mom”?

Flora blamed her translator for a heartbeat, but the red-blue girl said “mom” again and again, and the top student didn’t flinch, like the word had long found a home.

What a—shock, like a cymbal hitting bone.

“Shameless… woman!” Heat flooded Flora’s cheeks; steam felt ready to whistle from her hairline. She covered her face, eyes bulging like bronze bells, peeking through her fingers at the two girls as if sight alone could scrub the truth.

So beneath the top-student veneer, she hid something so indecent? She let a peer call her “mom” in the street? They must have done filthy things in private—they definitely went all the way, galloping past every line.

That’s not what heroes do—and not what support does either. Flora lectured herself, a stern drumbeat, and tightened her tail, a shadow clinging to heels.

She followed them across Arcadia like a stray star chasing a comet.

Krasus Platform, the Crafting Ward, the Ancient Alchemy Quarter, the Engineering Labs, the Dragon District, the Trade Bazaar—each block hums like a hive of lanterns.

Arcadia’s artisan spirit soaked into her bones; her focus drifted like a kite. When she snapped back, the two silhouettes had vanished into the human tide, a pair of fish slipping a net.

“Damn it, where’d they hide…”

She scanned anxiously. A shoulder slammed hers, a jolt like a bell.

The passerby saw her dazed look and offered a warning like a lifesaver. “Run! A mysterious mech is attacking indiscriminately up ahead!”

“Indiscriminate attacks?”

“Yeah. ‘Newborn City of Sin’ and all that—some folks always want to stir a pot in the dark. Anyway, move!”

Flora thanked them, but her feet didn’t turn with the river.

A mysterious mech meant danger, and danger meant thunder—meant heroes might arrive in lightning.

Flora’s legs made their choice like arrows loosed from a bow.

She ran toward the noise, not away from it, cutting against the current like a fish chasing rain.

Would that steel dragon descend again?

Or would another hero carve the sky?

As long as she could see a hero up close, even for one breath—

…And then she saw it.

The mech’s silhouette rose like a black cliff. Red lightning crawled along its frame, and its blade-sharp lines oozed killing intent, a storm bottled in steel. It tore at the ancient city like a wolf in a museum.

Roofs, galleries, pillars—each explosion shattered marble into white spray, raining stone into dust.

“Don’t…”

How could this city—awakened after five hundred years like a living fossil—suffer such rampage? The plea was a dove crushed under iron.

“Is anyone—ow!”

Flora caught a broken marble tile with her toe and crashed hard, the pavement a drum to her ribs.

The sound drew the mech’s attention. Its helmeted head, layered in armor, flashed a thin red glare across the eye slit, a laser eyeshadow of threat.

Gunfire stitched the air in a cruel rhythm.

“Waaah—?! Celestial Speech, um, Oz Floating Disc!” Panic hit first; training dragged behind like a stubborn mule. She rolled a bit, then remembered the spell, words tumbling like pebbles.

Magic—and the higher art of Ancient Alchemy—used to be aristocrats’ silverware. But with Mysidia’s backing, the Arcadia Engineering Academy runs widespread magic courses, lanterns for the common road. Flora learned a few basics—favorites of Huaxia’s hero, Magical Girl Icarus—the Levitation Spell and the Oz Floating Disc, both first-year material, both ropes thrown to a falling climber.

Bullets slammed into the transparent disc; cracks webbed like frost on glass. It bought her one breath, then another, a thin lung between storms. It would shatter any moment.

“Is anyone—someone—”

ROAR—!!

Time and space seemed to hold their breath, a lake going glass-still.

Afternoon sky, bright as polished steel, dimmed under a brighter presence, an avalanche of awe sweeping the street. Flora forgot to breathe, chest hollowed by wonder.

A dragon.

Silver-black Balafaruth.

A burst of starlight detonated beside Balafaruth, a supernova in daylight; another dragon stepped from the glare like a dream waking.

This one Flora didn’t recognize. Not armored head-to-tail like the mechanical patriarch, it looked shaped from light itself, a shimmering silver-blue, half transparent, with one or two plates of ideal red like cinnabar seals.

The moment the dragons appeared, every eye in the city snapped upward, like sunflowers turning to sun.

Balafaruth didn’t let the black mech blink. It lunged, jaws locking around the head, forelimbs clamping the body like iron manacles, wings unfurling wide enough to blot half the sky, bearing the enemy into vast height.

The unknown dragon didn’t follow at once.

It turned slightly. Under its armor, the left eye glanced at Flora sitting stunned on the broken street, a comet pausing for a child.

A glimpse like a falling star.

“Milky… Way…?”

She saw a thousand lights braided together, starlight shining in that eye like a river of night.

Farther than the sky,

brighter than neon,

deep as oceans, mysterious as silence—the cosmos seemed to turn inside that gaze.

As if it once looked up at a sea of stars, and the stars fell into its eye and never left.

It turned back without a word, wings whispering like silk. It caught up to Balafaruth, and dragon, dragon, mech tangled above Arcadia like storm serpents in a woven dance.

Flora stared, mouth open, thoughts blown like leaves.

“Hey, can you move? I’ll get you somewhere safe!” A woman in a white lab coat rushed out from a side alley, grip steady as a bracket, and helped Flora to her feet.

“Hero…”

“Huh?”

“Even if it’s a dragon—no, it should be a dragon! I finally get it!” Flora staggered upright, eyes locked on sky, voice ringing like a bell on a wind-swept tower.

“What are you even saying?!”

“Beauty. Power. Majesty. The hero I’ve hunted for is a dragon!” The claim leapt like a spark.

“????”

Maybe leave her be…

The researcher hesitated, but the sky didn’t wait; the fight flipped in a heartbeat, like a coin catching sun.

Under twin assaults, the black mech broke faster than its Omega Ray repairs could heal. First the arms, then legs and belly; soon the whole frame failed, spewing smoke as it fell like a dying comet.

Up to this point, everything felt clean as a cut.

Then the mech’s inner core, layered in armor like nested shells, revealed a human inside, a heart inside the machine.

The researcher froze, eyes filming over with disbelief.

The person disassembled the wreck in an instant, and the twin furnace hearts—two Silver Star systems—kicked into sudden overdrive at zero range, a sun igniting in a fist.

The dragons sensed something. They beat their wings in sync, retreating fast, like tides rolling back from an earthquake.

But the engines moved faster, a hawk diving through clouds.

Past a threshold, the twin cores collapsed inward, a pulse turning into a pit.

The sky tore, an ink seam cut across blue.

A black rift swallowed shards and light, shrank to its limit, then blew apart without a sound, a void screaming in silence.

“Hindrance Ripples—!!” The incantation cracked, but even the cry to raise a Flash Energy barrier drowned beneath a silent surge. A hemispherical shield sprang up toward the heavens, scooping the wild alien energy, holding every drop aloft.

It was like a black egg devouring the sky.

“What… is that?” Flora craned until her neck protested, and still couldn’t see the egg’s whole shape, only shadow upon shadow.

So this is the crisis heroes face—storms that swallow suns.

Even with a huge, sturdy shield, they draw the energy upward, to spare the city below—choice cut from bone.

So this is the choice heroes make—pain held in a closed fist.

If I want to be their support, how strong must I become, how high must I climb?

Crack. Crack. Fragile ice noises ticked across the dome.

The azure shield that cradled the energy groaned, spiderweb fissures spreading at its base, and a black viscous mass—like tar turned to liquid—hung and began to drip, ready to fall into Arcadia’s heart.

Flora dropped back to the ground, strength leaking like sand.

“Are we… doomed to only be protected?” The question tasted like ash.

SPLASH—!!

The shield shattered, and black mud poured down like a waterfall, the city beneath a bowl under a storm.

In the next heartbeat, space above Arcadia twisted into a shape words hate. The black mud, pulled by gravity a blink ago, boiled in place and surged upward, a river reversing itself midfall.

A hand settled on Flora’s shoulder and drew her behind, a lighthouse’s hand in fog.

“Heroes fight for justice and protect the weak,” a calm voice said, steady as a metronome. “But someone’s desire goes beyond that. She built the academy you entered for that desire—to light more lamps, so the weak can stand and protect themselves.”

In midair beside the researcher, a human-shaped figure hovered like a quiet equation. Its fluorescent-black body was covered in physics formulas, and it wore the same white lab coat as its master, silent as a shadow, yet impossible to ignore, like a mountain in mist.

“May I ask… who are you?” Flora asked softly, words tiptoeing.

Jiang Bailu smiled, warm as tea at dusk.

“As for me, her desire is my desire,” she said, voice like silk over steel. “I’ve figured it out. This feeling—whether true or false—is mine.”