“A…kla…tia?”

The man sounded out the letters on the insignia, one beat at a time, like ants crawling over brass.

He’d only joined the border outfit these past months, dust still on his boots, and the name rang like a faint bell.

“What kind of junk badge is that? What can you prove with it?”

He cut a look at Night Frost, disdain gleaming like a knife, confusion clouding like smoke, and he branded her a clown in his head.

He thought her brain was cracked like dry clay, a sideshow act in a war camp.

But the badge wasn’t for him; it was for the flaxen‑curled kid beside him, whose surprise rippled like a stone in a pond.

Her gaze dropped like a shutter, heavy and slow, as if she knew Aklatia had been uprooted by the Magic Maidens.

Yet ashes can hide embers, and Aklatia could still have remnants; or Night Frost could be a wolf in a borrowed pelt.

The flaxen‑haired kid wasn’t as simple as a clean face; Night Frost had smelled that steel outside the tent like iron in rain.

The kid seemed to know the border outfit were carrion crows, yet she cowered like a bird under a hawk’s shadow before the stupid young man.

She was sharp enough to live alone, quick as a fox, but her eyes held the soft collapse of wet paper.

She drew breath to speak, but the young man sliced across her words, impatience crackling like dry thorns in a fire.

He stared at the two of them locking eyes, strings between puppets, and he felt played like a drum.

“It’s just a busted badge! What’s there to stare at?”

He lunged to snatch it, all elbows and greed, but Night Frost moved like a falling leaf and tucked it into her Spatial Box.

Her gaze was calm as autumn water; she slipped behind him like a shadow and laid him down to sleep.

Very gentle, like snuffing a candle with wet fingers, not a hint of open violence.

Now only the shy flaxen‑haired kid and Night Frost were awake, brown eyes meeting scarlet‑gold like earth meeting dusk.

Night Frost knew this little one wouldn’t speak first, so she let the question fall like rain.

“From your look, you know Aklatia’s fallen, right? And you’re wondering who I am, yeah?”

The kid nodded, the motion small as a reed in wind, because Night Frost had spoken straight into her chest.

Night Frost dressed like an Order Keeper, clean lines like frost on glass, but her methods moved far from that campfire.

“Don’t call me ‘kid’—call me Kaneko. And you’re right.”

“You’re not a boy?”

Kaneko shook her head, a dry wheat‑sheaf swaying, a real girl under a boy’s cut, and Night Frost’s tone held a faint, cooling sigh.

It wasn’t perversity; lately she’d been wading through women like reeds in a marsh, and habit had blurred like fog on a mirror.

Magic Maidens were women, her class brimmed with girls, and even the new Aklatia leaned female, until she almost forgot being Lingchen Yao.

She missed those rowdy friends like the warmth of a brazier, yet since becoming a Magic Maiden, that past sat far as the moon.

Back to the trail, she dropped the gender talk like a pebble and began to chart Aklatia’s map.

“I’m the current leader of Aklatia. You can call me Night Frost.”

Kaneko nodded again, tucking the name away like a pressed leaf.

“I don’t know the purge by the Magic Maidens in detail; all I know of Aklatia came from a remnant.”

“So you’re a leader raised by remnants?”

Kaneko studied Night Frost, sketches forming like charcoal strokes—perhaps a puppet—then she rubbed them out, because Aklatia did experiments, not puppetry.

“That remnant called himself the Doctor.”

Kaneko’s pupils tightened like a noose, because if other remnants backed her, that meant charisma, but if the Doctor backed her, that meant a banner.

More shocking still, the Doctor wasn’t dead; that truth thudded like a heart under the floor.

He was a titan of genetics, a mountain in that field, who used his own body as a crucible to forge gene modifications.

Those modifications lit power in people like torches, not beneath the Magic Maidens in the dark or in the open.

After he joined Aklatia and his talent blazed, countless hands reached like hooks, waving purses thick as bricks, and none could pry him free.

His loyalty stood with the sky as witness, blue and bare; if he backed Night Frost, then she was orthodox flame.

The Doctor must have seen a spark on her that could kindle Aklatia’s return, like fire catching dry pine.

Kaneko remembered the badge in Night Frost’s hand, carved from Obsidian Stone that drank light like ink.

Few could forge obsidian, and this badge had no need for a lie, solid as a river rock.

Everything Night Frost said fit together like dovetail joints, but one plank creaked—the premise of surviving remnants.

If the Doctor had died, then her story was smoke; if he lived, then she was a better bet than these bone‑gnawing border men.

“You can’t prove the Doctor is alive.”

“True. The Doctor isn’t with me. He vanished in a recent tide of Monsters, swept off by other groups like driftwood.”

“Aklatia is still too weak to stand against them, whether Order Keeper or border outfits,” she said, the truth laid out like bare steel.

That made Kaneko believe a little more; Night Frost hadn’t hidden the ache, and honesty cut like a clean blade.

Eye Orb’s departure had hurt like a pulled root, because he was her entry mentor as a Magic Maiden, the hand that lit her spark.

“Then tell me why you hate the Magic Maidens of the Twelfth District so much,” Kaneko said, voice low as dusk.

“You’d work with trash like this just to overturn the Twelfth District?”

Kaneko knew Night Frost’s purpose wasn’t pure, and she smoothed her flaxen hair like settling straw, eyes dropping to veil her grief.

“It’s not me chasing revenge. It’s him. Our captain chose to die, and he twisted it, out of greed, to blame the Magic Maidens.”

Night Frost blinked, surprise flashing like a fish, and glanced at the man on the ground; his face was lacquer, his core was rot.

“Back then, a silver‑haired Magic Maiden forced border members to form a flesh‑and‑blood wall against the Monster tide.”

“Our captain stood in that wall, and he gladly gave his life to this land; he was a warrior.”

Sorrow loosened Kaneko’s tongue like warm wine, and words poured out without her noticing.

Night Frost caught the key glints like a magpie; silver hair was rare in the Twelfth District, and force like that meant Illusory Glass.

Illusory Glass holds time like water in her palm; to raise a defense in a blink, blunt force was the straightest road.

“They want to topple the Magic Maidens’ rule and bring back the old world,” Kaneko said, voice like wind over old stones.

Night Frost had heard of them, the rebels who wanted the days before the Magic Maidens stood in daylight.

Since the Magic Maidens took power, expulsions and pressure stacked like stones, and many rebels were the ones shoved out.

“Monsters killed the captain and everyone. We ran with his will like torches, and the fleeing line broke like ice.”

The tide chewed their numbers from dozens to a handful, and clashing aims split them—revenge, quiet growth, surrender—like forks in a river.

Their line kept thinning, and in the end it left only the unconscious young man on the floor and the flaxen‑haired girl.

Kaneko carried the scent of Mana like a faint ozone after lightning, weak but bleeding through her small frame.

When Mana outweighs flesh, it leaks like steam from seams, and Night Frost felt that thread at once.

Kaneko was a Magic Maiden and not, a special edge like a glass blade, and Night Frost sensed depth behind the shy face.

Her words had an old steadiness, a stone under water, and compared to the young man, she saw further by far.

Because she had Mana, Night Frost guessed the talk would bear fruit, and the guess ripened like grain.

She learned the man’s rotten aim between the lines, so her invitation was meant for Kaneko alone, like a letter sealed in wax.

“I’m here to invite you to join Aklatia. We’re new, but we mean to topple the Magic Maidens’ rule.”

Kaneko didn’t plan to join; she believed Night Frost couldn’t be clean of the Twelfth District’s Magic Maidens, threads tied like vines.

She kept silent, but her face spoke no, longing for the small warm group that felt like a hearth.

That door was likely shut now, wind‑blown and dark, but longing still burned like coals.

Night Frost understood and didn’t press, letting the matter lie like snow.

“If we had to take you out—”

Kaneko shook her head, gentle and firm, and Night Frost read the answer like a signpost.

She left the tent, clicked off the recorder like a snapped twig, and slid it into the Spatial Box at her waist.

On the road, you pack a few tricks like knives in boots, in case someone plays you in the dark.

A stare pricked her skin like a thorn, and she dropped into a crouch and slipped from the tent like a cat.

She flowed back to Chen Xiaoyin’s side, breath steady as a winter stream.

“That’s how it is.”

“Poor kid,” Chen Xiaoyin said, pity pooling like warm tea, and the two orphans felt the same tugging string.

Their headmistress‑grandma was their new anchor, a pier in storm, like Kaneko’s captain had been, and that anchor was gone.

“But that man was way out of line, and these groups are no saints either,” she added, voice cool as shade.