The girl and Xun Xun ignored the bodyguard crouched in the shadows, a rat behind a crate, who’d watched the whole fight start to finish. He’d wanted to strike while Xun Xun’s hand was hurt, but fear bit him cold; the girl stood too close.

At the doorway, the doctors scattered like birds and beasts, tossing their half-dead ally onto the floor as if he were refuse blowing in the wind.

Neither of them knew medicine. Danger smelled like bitter herbs. Shelves brimmed with drugs, yet Xun Xun didn’t dare feed the bodyguard anything, even if the pills might be potent.

He asked the girl to set him down. The bodyguard needed her hands more than he did. She hoisted the man and waited, quiet as a willow in rain, while Xun Xun went to test the front door.

At the main gate, there was no maze of electronics, only a single handle. It felt locked like a frozen bone. No matter how he pulled, it wouldn’t budge.

No doubt the doctors had sealed every exit when they fled. The building’s lungs—the ventilation ducts—were still open, but carrying an unconscious man through them was a plan made of smoke.

Would they be trapped here, swallowed by concrete and quiet?

Xun Xun refused. He’d come this far; a single door wouldn’t be his mountain. Options flickered like lanterns: break the alloy gate, crawl the ducts, or find a new path.

“What’s your name? We’ve been together this long and I still don’t know. I’m Xun Xun—first Xun with the grass radical, second Xun with the water radical.”

The girl thought for a moment, chasing the shapes, then let it go; escape mattered more than ink on paper.

“I’m Song Jiu. You can call me Song Jiu, or Jiu Jiu. Jiu Jiu’s real strong, you know~”

Sweetness lit her face; her clear eyes held no shadow. Her body was no longer human, yet her spirit stayed sunlit. Xun Xun admired that.

Most people, turned into Monsters, caged for five years, kin scattered like leaves, would drown in winter despair.

Her optimism warmed him. Xun Xun smiled and let out a long breath; half his tension melted like frost at dawn.

Jiu Jiu tried to melt the door. The fireproof paint barely blistered, but thinning the gate would let her punch through like a river eating sand.

Crack!

A whispering rasp slid into Jiu Jiu’s ears. They broke off their talk and turned toward the sound, hawks to a rustle.

Far away, a seam opened in the polished floor, fine as a hair. It widened, and an elevator rose from the earth like a cold altar.

Both felt the wrongness. Xun Xun remembered the ticket seller’s words: this was District Twenty One’s largest Modification Center. It couldn’t be only a handful of rooms. There had to be unseen space, and predators in the dark.

From the elevator stepped a man and a woman. The man was almost entirely machine. The woman carried no ripple of Mana, no aura; she looked like a face in a crowd.

They grumbled about the sudden alarm and the snail-slow elevator. Ten minutes from R&D, time dripping like tar.

They stood by shattered vessels, pity flashing like a thin moon. They seemed to guess the shape of what had happened.

“To make a test piece, you seize the mind first. But he called her his sister, couldn’t bear it. Laughable. In the end, her sister killed him anyway.”

She’d checked the exits on the way. Every visible door was force-sealed. The doctors and researchers had professional spines. If she were the boss, she’d give them a raise.

Too bad their boss was an iron rooster, tighter than a locked fist, not a coin to shake loose.

Either way, the subject must not leave this district. The fallout wouldn’t ruin them, but it would stain the whole Modification Center.

Just last week, a lab by Forest Park let a Monster slip. It turned the lake to mud, the park to a stinking mire.

District Twenty One’s Order Keeper almost fully mobilized, damming the spread of sludge like soldiers against a flood.

Heavy metal steps sounded from the room’s depths. The man had gone in to search for clues. Now he dragged a bodyguard like a dead dog and slammed him onto the floor.

The woman raised a hand. Mana became a Blade; she moved to take his head, clean as slicing a gourd.

The guard went pale, begged for life, and blurted that he knew where the subject had run.

The light Blade faded. She offered him one chance: if his info was true, and they found the subject smoothly, she’d send him back to his master in one piece.

Jiu Jiu and Xun Xun were close to the main door. Jiu Jiu heard every word, clear as bells. She ached to crush that wretch, but moving now would bare their tracks.

“Three heat sources over there,” the man said, turning his gaze. His thermal glasses showed three lives, one hot beyond normal. That had to be the subject.

The guard brightened and stammered, “Then… can you let—”

Her palm fell onto his skull. Invisible Mana slid past skin into marrow; blood welled from his body like a red spring. He died without a cry.

She was satisfied. His organs were pulp, yet his body remained intact—promise kept, in her way.

“You’re still so twisted,” the man muttered. He had no right to stop her; the guard had always been a dead leaf. She had only cut it.

“Compared to those other people, I keep it clean,” she said. “Shame he had no sense of art.”

She wiped her palm, ignored the corpse, and strode out like a blade. The man followed, wordless. She was cleaner than the so-called scientists, and more elegant.

He would rather work with her than those mad folks who worship equations.

Her gaze swept the visible corners. A thin thread of Abyssal Aura tickled her senses. She had them—little mice, not far.

She gauged Jiu Jiu’s strength. Above First Symphony, able to beat some weak ones in Cantata Two, like her sister, whose power was stacked by drugs.

Her sister had sat in Cantata Two briefly, but age dulled the brew, and the hidden costs rose like thorns. Her strength withered before the eye.

Jiu Jiu grew, fed by a Heart of Lava. Her sister shrank, eaten by her medicine. Dying to Jiu Jiu didn’t surprise the woman.

“Found you, little mouse.”

She drew the miao dao at her waist. A gust rolled out; the hard alloy wall opened under her cut, a clean mouth lunging for Jiu Jiu’s head.

Jiu Jiu flung the bodyguard to Xun Xun. Lava rushed over her body in a blink. The keen miao dao tore the molten shell and left a shallow blood mark on her brow.

She understood. This woman stood on a different ridge than her sister. With Jiu Jiu’s current strength, she could only take the blows.

She turned to urge Xun Xun to flee, but the machine-laced man had already engaged him.

Xun Xun’s Mechanical Arm was the newest model, but his combat craft and modifications fell short of the iron man.

The man’s steam-driven arm caught Xun Xun’s latest with ease. The clash kicked back a force like a thunder wave, numbing Xun Xun to the spine.

The steam arm squeezed. The seam where flesh met metal creaked. Fresh stitches tugged. After two fights, that interface was already in tatters.

“Too bad,” the man sighed. “Low on power. Stitches not healed. I almost wanted a proper bout with the newest prosthetic.”

He held Xun Xun up, limp as a puppet, and simply waited for the woman to finish with Jiu Jiu.

Jiu Jiu’s defense was decent. The heat of her surface magma kept the woman at bay, a wall of fire in a corridor of steel.

But the Mana Blade uncoiled from the woman’s sleeve wasn’t here to eat. It flung an arc through the air, slicing rock at ten paces.

Jiu Jiu fell back, but the woman chased like wind over grass. The sharp Blade shaved off slabs of rock from Jiu Jiu’s shell without nicking the flesh beneath.

Joy and hunger sparked in the woman’s eyes, hard to hide. In her gaze, Jiu Jiu was a refined piece of art.