You’re incorrigible—fine, fine, I’m convinced; let’s get inside, the real work calls like a drum in mist.
Aphelia said it while Uroboros kept that impish pose, smiling like a fox in sunlight, until Aphelia sighed and smiled back; then Uroboros rose, laughing, and strode ahead like a scout.
When the steel gate eased open, both finally saw the last gate before the base for what it was, not just reforged iron but a puzzle of bone and breath.
“Uroboros, do you recognize this craft?” Aphelia’s voice was steady, like water under ice.
Inside the steel skin lay an intricate forest of mechanisms, not welded, not machined by this era, more like teeth meant to mesh clean, a hive of quiet gears.
Yes—gears, clear as constellations cut into iron.
Those varied forms filled the gate like pebbles in a riverbed; from the split edges you could see left and right dovetailing—convex to concave—locking like bite to ridge.
Aphelia’s mind unfurled, her spirit sweeping over the twin doors like a net of starlight, every line ringing like a spiderweb in rain.
So that’s it.
Through Aether she parsed the whole structure, turning steel into a map in her skull, and relief washed in like dawn—good thing she hadn’t struck blind and shattered a masterpiece.
When the doors met, the scattered parts woke like swallows, slid and nested, up and down, left and right, turning the gate into one seamless iron plate with no seam to breathe.
A thousand locks married, then remarried, one added to one, then another pair added, layers like waves stacking, a scattered choir becoming a shield that spreads force like wind in pines.
The result was defense raised like a mountain’s spine; others may have dreamed this, but in Aphelia’s time it was a bridge drawn in fog.
“This maker’s touch and signature feel familiar… oh, I remember! Big—something—no, Davinci—wait, let me think… right, Leonardo da Vinci,” Uroboros murmured, memory flickering like lanterns in a long night.
She took the images from Aphelia’s mind, turned them across angles like facets of jade, found her answer; muddled recollections drifted, and age asked for gentleness like tea in winter.
To confirm, Uroboros let her fingertips unravel into fine black mist, smoke peeling off charcoal; before Aphelia could stop her, the mist slipped into a metal module like ink.
Eyes closed, she moved the piece as if recalling an old melody; Aphelia watched, curious as a cat, amazed Uroboros had pinned a proper name with the clarity of frost.
Leonardo da Vinci… what kind of person carves such god-carved machinery? If you belong to this era, don’t fall; I want to meet a genius whose hands birth storms.
As Aphelia wondered, Uroboros’s mist touched a trigger; no trap sprang—instead the mechanisms sang, gears crossing like dancers, metal chiming in order, a symphony under a white vault.
“See, Aphelia, this structure—I didn’t misremember. It’s Leonardo da Vinci’s work. Only she would lace her pieces with her quirks; I once helped her realize such wild dreams.”
Uroboros exhaled like wind after toil, shook her head as if sifting solid memory, then lobbed a forearm-long metal column to Aphelia and wandered forward like a cloud.
A weaker woman would’ve dropped it; Aphelia caught the weight like stone pulled from a river and weighed it—still heavy to a human hand, even with strength like thunder.
Seeing Uroboros go, Aphelia followed, turning the column in her fingers like a puzzle box; soon she traced its joints and admired Leonardo with a smile like moon on water.
No welding, no extra machining, just geometry stitching metal like leaves weaving into a nest—an unalloyed genius, a mind carving order from chaos like frost patterns on glass.
“Is this safe, Uroboros? If we don’t slot it back, what if the internal structures unravel like threads?”
Worry pricked like a thorn; she’d seen many alchemical frames self-destruct once a glyph or piece went missing, flames folding inward like dying flowers.
“It’s fine, it’s fine. That big—eccentric—wouldn’t set self-destructs; with her obsession, even abandoned inventions stay hers. I pulled the… array core, I suppose, so the dynamic balance should settle.”
Uroboros waved, smiling like dusk after rain; the recollection had cleared like sediment in tea, and a vivid figure stood in her mind like a statue come alive.
“What a wonder—if such a genius still lives… Move, Uroboros!” Aphelia’s heart clenched like a fist, and then Crimson Flame and black Aether braided from her arm like twin serpents.
Uroboros felt it too; the corridor bloomed with a sudden “light,” a blue-white bar at waist height, more blade than beam, a river of edge sweeping to cut.
They’d stepped into a transparent, pure-white passage where hidden lasers herded those blades like shepherd dogs; the attack came, bright and cold as winter sun.
What a joke; they break the sound barrier like snapping twigs. This speed was track-meet human, not godspeed; the blade scythed only their afterimages like wind through reeds.
They dipped and flowed under it, calm as swallows skimming a lake, bodies lowering while the light screamed past like rain.
To their eyes, the thing ran slower than a jog, a turtle sprinting on glass.
“Wait, Uroboros—don’t smash it yet. Let me see; it might be useful for the Valkyries,” Aphelia said, curiosity lighting like a lantern.
She turned to catch the blade, but it vanished at the corridor’s end like a fish into shade; then it reappeared opposite, two blades crossed into an X, cutting toward them like twin scythes.
