VNT: Vaetna-type. An obnoxiously inaccurate term; for one, none were equal to the Vaetna, and for two, the term was haphazardly applied to essentially any group where a flamebearer held a major role, not just ones that shared the Vaetna’s philosophy of violence. The PCTF and Todai were definitely tier 2 VNT groups; Hikanome was more like tier 3, from what I understood, although all the cults fell under the label to different extents. By comparison, a university with a department of Ripple Studies or Glyph Engineering would by necessity be associated with at least one flamebearer, but were generally not considered VNT groups in themselves.
Really, geopolitical impact was the main metric, and in that regard, it was little wonder that the Spire’s knights were the namesake. For years, I’d gone out of my way to avoid using the term, because I felt it diminished the Vaetna by proxy when applied to even the tier 2 groups, but eventually I’d caved—mostly for lack of any other term with the same colloquial clarity. “Influential flamebearer” and other such substitute terms just had a lot more ambiguity in forum threads.
But Todai were definitely VNTs. In fact, I was begrudgingly starting to think that they were some of the most Vaetna-like of any group. The parallels between mantles and dermis went without saying, of course, but my first up-close-and-personal combat training brought it into much more visceral perspective.
“You’ve never used it against somebody else,” Ai deduced, gesturing at my spear lying forlornly next to me. She’d casually sidestepped a thrust and wrenched the haft out of my hand entirely before sending me onto the mat. I sat up, groaning.
“No. I, um, looked a little bit for classes, but HEMA is specifically swords, and the only spear things I could find were closer to London, which is too far.” I checked my foot to make sure our seconds-long bout hadn’t already damaged the amputation site. “Way too far, now.”
“Not too far,” Ai shone a sunny smile, which I could pretend was the reason my face was hot. She hadn’t even felt the need to take off her jacket before taking me on. “Actually, I think you’re right where you should be.”
“What, on the floor?”
She winced. “Oh, no, not what I meant.”
“I need practice,” I admitted. “But, um, if Hikanome is safe, or at least this event will be, why are we doing this now?”
“Why do you think?”
“Because…summoning my spear is already my first instinct in danger?”
“Mm, yes, that’s part of it. It’s actually a good thing that you can arm yourself without thinking, so you should be able to use it better. But that’s only part of it. I agree with Ishikawa-san: You need to feel like you can fight back if you’re in danger.”
“Wow, way to just cut me right open.”
She frowned.
“I’m unarmed. Do you want to go spear-on-spear?”
“Uh, not what I meant, but…kind of?” I recalled the spear to my hand. “Feel like I’d get thrashed even harder, though.” It didn’t bruise my ego to admit that, or at least not as much as I’d expected.
“True. Your biggest problem right now…you’re trying to be faster than me. Your footwork seems good, and you understand your reach advantage, but even if you were reacting to me in time, I just have a speed advantage.”
“Okay? Is that just an experience thing?”
“Not entirely. I’m cheating.”
She turned away from me and shrugged off the jacket, tossing it to the side, then began to pull up the hem of her tank top—
“What are you doing?”
The question was answered once she pulled the garment off, exposing the tattoo binding Amane had mentioned and I’d promptly forgotten about. Down Ai’s spine ran a complex, interlinked glyph, in vivid, fluorescent green. Or rather, a 2D shadow of a 3D chain of glyphs, like my {COMPOSE} tattoo on my arm. My curiosity warred with my embarrassment, eyes tracing up her back to where the tattoo ran under her sports bra before reappearing and continuing its gradients and symmetrical patterns until it terminated at the base of her neck. It covered most of her back, especially wide at the shoulders and hips where it was denser with additional arrangements of glyphs.
The glyphs that made up the tattoo were clearly based on the same principles she had pioneered for prosthesis animation, enhancing the motion of her limbs, but the longer I looked, the more I could tease out other functionality. Most notable was the set of smaller, more-intricate patterns spaced regularly along her spine: ward segments to disrupt offensive magic intended to pulp her soft, squishy insides or slice her in half. Each of the ward sections—overall sort of hourglass-shaped—also had another node on the end, {AFFIX}-{DISSIPATE}: kinetic dampening applied inward so she didn’t shatter her own bones by throwing an enhanced punch.
Of course, I would have already known the technical points in intimate detail had I looked at the file Ebi had sent me last night, but my work ethic had been rather low between then and now—I’d been free from responsibility and enjoying my new PC and not gotten a whit of real glyph work done. I felt a little guilty for having not done my reading, but then again, Ai hadn’t given me much notice to come work out; she’d just knocked on my door and told me it was time to do some light diagnostic training.
“Do I need to explain any part of it?”
I jumped, realizing I’d been staring at her exposed back for inappropriately long. I averted my gaze hurriedly, pretending to inspect the hexagonal, interlinked pads lining the lower part of the dojo’s walls.
“Um, I think I get it. Strength, speed, and durability? Wards, too…wait,” I recalled my spear into my arm, returning it to its tattoo form, a simple, dark line that shone with iridescence when it caught the dojo’s lights in just the right way. “Yours is an actual chain of glyphs, but mine is symbolic.”
“We’ve gotten better at it over time. If you look here—” she pointed at her lower back, seemingly unembarrassed at the exposure as she indicated a more roughly inked part of the chain “—this is the oldest part. Also, this is all kinetics, no {COMPOSED} matter, so if I make a mistake when I alter the weave…”
She mimed an implosion with her hands and made a hissing, gurgling noise like something wet being sucked through a tube. A messy way to go.
“Ah.”
“Yes. That, and I really like the design.”
I swallowed my embarrassment and looked intently again at the expanse of bare skin, but if she meant a specific element, I didn’t see it.
“Uh? I mean, it’s got clever propagation channeling, I suppose. Really good.” I squinted. “Oh, and the way you split the channels for {DEFLECT}, that’s—”
“Not the glyph design, the artwork.”
“Artwork?” I repeated dumbly.
Ai sighed and paced away from me. As she receded, my eyes stopped being able to make out the individual details of each viridian glyph, turning the tattoo into, well—a tattoo. Now I saw the design.
“Oh, wow.”
“Deshou? Ebi-tan did a great job.”
Ai had a pair of feathery wings folded on her back, each line of glyphs coalescing into the negative space of a shadow cast by the feathers. Some of the more geometric chains, too symmetrical and boxy to mimic the play of light over organic shapes, instead took on the look of pistons or lever arms, as though the feathers were attached to a mechanical frame mounted to her back. I followed the train of logic.
“Can you fly?” I hadn’t seen the type of anti-gravity lattices one would expect, the sort that were in Heliotrope’s jetbike.
“Not as well as the wings suggest,” she admitted. “Ah…right, Hina jumped you home the other day, didn’t she?”
The memory of falling out of the sky made my stomach churn.
“Yes?”
“It’s more controlled than that,” she assured with a smile. “Big jump, then glide. I can show you, but I don’t think it’d be very helpful for you right now.”
Not helpful, perhaps, but I was suddenly paying much closer attention. I’d written off her enhancements as what was often termed “human-plus,” but limited flight gave her three-dimensional maneuverability that put her in the realm of the Vaetna, to an extent.
“Um, if it’s not too much of a hassle…”
—
To my slight disappointment, Ai did not immediately leap into the air and begin bounding around the dojo. She gave a much more practical demonstration—one which included a spear. It was a simple training spear, plastic haft, foam tip, and on the short side by my standards. Mine was longer than I was tall; the one Ai had selected was roughly her height. She brought one of the wooden dummies to the middle of the room and began a simple training sequence.
Her movements were distinct from mine in a number of ways. My style was modeled on—inspired by, really—Heung’s moves, with a lot of powerful strikes to abuse range, as she’d noted, and I generally tried to emphasize control of my footwork, lacking the spearmaster’s ability to supernaturally correct out of overbalance and put force behind any blow no matter how improbable. In doing so, I achieved what I thought to be the closest imitation to his motions that one could approximate, accounting for the fact that I had to deal with things like momentum and gravity and the limited space of my old living situation. And Ai’s warm-up sequence was still—loosely—abiding by those basic rules of physics, but the way she was striking—
She barely used the spear tip. She switched freely between one-handed and two-handed stances, striking with the haft, more like a quarterstaff than a spear. Too, she fought with her body as much as the weapon, an up-close-and-personal style with knee strikes and dancing footwork; variations on the same moves she’d used to take me down in our brief bout of sparring. This time, though, she fully engaged her magical augmentations and wasn’t holding back anything; each blow was full-force, as far as I could tell. She’d go for the head, ribs, stomach, knees, groin. Cracking noises filled the air in a staccato rhythm of violence.
You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.
Then she began to speed up.
It’s difficult to express how exactly Ai’s movements changed. The closest example would be as though she were a video played fifty percent faster than normal, which captures the way her movements seemed to lose inertia as though the spear were practically weightless—but that comparison also gives the image of cartoonishly jerky motions. Instead, her motions took on a sort of grace. The dance went from the exertions of muscles and tendons fighting momentum and gravity to something else, destructive motion flowing through her body and depositing lethal energy into the dummy’s wooden frame. Each enhanced strike was loud enough to make me flinch and sent splinters flying.
I saw in her movements the barest shadow of the Vaetna’s aspect. Lesser—closer-in and more brutal, still half-tethered to the dojo’s floor. If the dummy were a real, unaugmented human, they’d already be dead from blunt force trauma—a far less clean death than by a vaet or LM dart, merely straddling the border of supernatural violence without transcending to the level of true, unfettered destruction. Ai swung the butt of the spear into the dummy’s shoulder and followed with a low leg sweep that was distinctly unlike anything a Vaetna would do—the first strike would have been with a blade and ended the fight there. As it was, the enhanced kick was forceful enough to defeat the dummy’s stabilized base and send it tumbling.
The next few moments were a blur of further-accelerated violence that I only parsed after the fact. Ai flipped, spun, and then there was a whistling noise, a crunch, and a bang. The sound echoed through the room as Ai doubled over, hands on her knees, glyph-woven wings aglow against her muscular back as she caught her breath. After a few measured breaths, she raised her head to join me in looking up at her grisly handiwork.
The dummy had struck the top edge of the padding on the far wall, impaled through the chest, some four or five meters up from the floor. It was split down the middle around the speartip. The spear’s plastic haft had been partially melted and distorted by friction as it had left Ai’s hand. That was a singular strike more suited to the Vaetna; a pang of jealous excitement ran through me at the thought, chased immediately by awful guilt for envying such a killing blow. The jealousy won.
“Um. Didn’t—didn’t it have a foam tip?”
“Yes. So don’t do that with yours.”
“I can’t. And you’re the weakest of them?”
She looked at me with some surprise at the bitterness in my tone, muscular arms glistening with sweat as she rolled her shoulders—but those weren’t where the real power lay. The intricate green lattice was what had enabled this. My mind was racing a mile a minute: with only that enhancement, Ai’s display of physicality just now had grazed the bottom edge of the zone of physical power that I considered solely the Vaetna’s domain. She nodded.
“Hina is faster than me and has more tricks.”
Hina’s elevated physiology was even more powerful, those changes she’d subtly promised me if only I was willing. Of course, I’d already seen little tastes of her power, but not simple, transcendental physical prowess, not really. No wonder her predatory aspect alarmed me deep in my bones—I made a conscious effort to stop biting my lip.
“And…mantles? I was under the impression that Amethyst’s g—gun,” I stumbled over the instrument of violence I’d enabled, “was fairly representative of the overall fighting style, ranged rather than melee combat, but that doesn’t look to be indicative of…”
“It’s quite physical. Kinetic. You haven’t seen many videos of us fighting, have you?”
“I was going to get around to it.”
“You weren’t,” she countered bluntly. There was no accusation in the tone; she was actually smiling. “I say that all the time and then never get around to it unless Ebi-tan or Takehara-san remind me. But I’ve set aside this whole afternoon anyway—let’s have lunch, and I’ll show you some combat footage. You’ll understand the lattice diagrams much better with practical examples.”
—
Ai’s idea of lunch was cup ramen. While the noodles rehydrated in hot water, she disappeared upstairs briefly, returning with a laptop and cables. She set up the laptop to feed into the big TV in the common area and started queuing up YouTube clips and opening up an instance of GWalk.
The noodles were honestly pretty good, at least relative to the miniscule amount of effort they had taken. Ai and I had different types; she’d given me what was supposedly the default, where the extra bits were little chunks of unidentifiable salty meat and tiny shrimp, but her own was a curry soup variation with a tempting aroma. I stirred the noodles with the training chopsticks she had made for me, which had apparently been living with the other silverware in the kitchen.
“I, uh, don’t think I ever thanked you for these.”
She smiled.
“You’re welcome.”
“I mean, they fit really well. Perfectly, in fact. Did you scan my hand or something?”
“Yes.”
“Huh.”
The first video we watched was, of all things, a TV interview with Alice from two years ago. The dragon-girl looked slightly different; her tail was only half as long as I was used to, and not as thick. It was awkwardly tucked behind her as she sat forward in an oversized, padded chair, shifting uncomfortably. It was easy to imagine why, with the limb squished behind her like that. I glanced over at Ai, who was wearing a sympathetic grimace.
“Didn’t you say combat footage?”
“In a bit, but this is a really good interview. Very helpful.”
TV-Alice was soldiering through the pain, bantering with the trio of hosts. It was about a minute into the interview when I brought up the obvious issue.
“…This is in Japanese, Ai.”
“Oh.”
Ai physically flinched at her error, reaching over to the laptop to turn on subtitles, revealing that Alice was discussing mantle transformations. After a few more minutes of introductory discussions, consisting mostly of Alice introducing her team and being humble in the face of the interviewers—two of whom were obviously star-struck—some slides with graphs came on screen. I blinked at the numbers involved and the graphic of Alice’s mantle in flight next to a jet fighter.
“Seventy kilonewtons of thrust?”
“Yes!” Ai sounded so proud, pausing the video to tab over to GWalk, where she had Alice’s mantle diagram loaded. She moused over the propulsion section of the lattice. “Going fast is really easy when you don’t have to worry about holding the craft together, carrying fuel, any of that.”
I knew that, of course; I was already mentally comparing these numbers to the Vaetna’s. Between Gates and teleportation, it was actually somewhat uncommon for them to fly long distances, and they didn’t tend to use direct thrust in a way that was easily quantifiable as force—but I knew that when Heung wanted to go fast, he could output over two hundred kilonewtons to break the sound barrier in under a second. He’d done that sort of acceleration to intercept my flamefall. So at least for this metric, the Radiances still only measured up to a fraction of the Vaetna—but a significant fraction.
So it went with other statistics. Alice’s interview didn’t disclose things like armaments or exact quantity of magical power being used, for obvious reasons, but I had those numbers right in front of me in the lattice diagram, and every time it was the same story: not a direct match for the Vaetna, but close enough that they were in the ballpark…with one exception.
“We can’t compete on ripple leakage, of course. We’ve lowered FRR by almost ninety percent since the first prototypes, since of course that’s critical for Amane’s well-being, but compared to the Vaetna…” Ai trailed off.
The Vaetna famously produced zero free ripple—the extra uncontrolled stuff which had zany and often deleterious effects on its surroundings—when casting magic; the running theory was that the Spire itself modulated that as a byproduct of the fact that every Vaetna’s Flame was partially woven into it, but as usual, there was no official word on the subject. This dovetailed with their other environmental efforts, since magical pollution was a special kind of ugly. TV-Alice agreed, asserting that it was a completely unacceptable form of collateral damage for mahou shoujo.
We eventually moved on from the interview to the promised combat clips so that I could see these abstract numbers in action. And in action, they did look a lot like the Vaetna, enough that my jealousy for that unattainable form, cooled to bare embers by years of resignation, was starting to reignite. Refocus.
Maybe it wasn’t so unattainable.
—
At some point, Ai’s series of videos and data sheets tapered off, and we wound up just chatting about magic. The broth-stained plastic cups on the table had been joined by a bag of potato chips from which we both snacked freely while we curled up on the sofa. Soothed by Ai’s calm demeanor, I found it in me to open up somewhat about the Vaetna, my fascination for them, my desire to see the Spire with my own eyes—and my contradictory resolution to stick around in spite of all that and the forecasted danger. I shared with her what I had overheard from Yuuka.
“Three weeks.”
Ai seemed to think hard for a moment, running numbers in her head. When she refocused on me, she was confident, solid. I was grateful.
“We’ll be ready.”
“Ready for what, exactly?”
“It won’t be fighting right away, I think. They’ll try to buy you first. Etto…poach. Poach you. Every year, I get huge offers to work at one of the US research groups. Lockheed Martin, Carnegie Mellon, General Dynamics…”
“The ones who develop directly for the PCTF,” I followed.
“Yes. And I never will, of course.”
“Neither will I,” I assured her. “I mean, if they wanted me, they had years to come pick me up. But I’ve rather…soured on them, of late.”
“Soured on them,” Ai repeated, trying out the expression. “I like that phrase. Suppakunatta. Doesn’t work as well in Japanese. Has she been better to you?”
I winced.
“Haven’t been face-to-face since then, so I don’t know, but…it wasn’t great, when she was talking to Alice.”
A burst of rent air interrupted us. Hina pranced her way into three-space, startling me and setting my thoughts awhirl as I registered the cozy, intimate situation Ai and I had spent the last two or three hours in—it can’t have looked good, if Hina were the type to care about such things. But she just happily flopped onto the sofa next to me, of course.
“Hey, cuties!”
“Hina-san. Oshigoto wa?”
“Bleh. Meetings! They don’t need me.” The puppy shimmied to snuggle up against me, and I tried very hard not to look down her blouse as she undid the top few buttons. “How’s it hangin’?”
“Good,” I spluttered, trying for nonchalance and failing. “The, um. Mantles. Yep.”
“Ooooh. Getting in that circuitry, huh?”
“You could say that.” Ai hummed. “Actually, we were just talking about Yuuka-chan. It seems like your shitsuke hasn’t worked.”
Hina pouted. “And I took away her chocolate and everything…”
That made Ai’s eyebrows go up. “Ara. I was talking about the violence, but that’s more serious for you. Did you give Ezzen some?”
“Of course! And it was good, right, cutie?” She snuggled closer against me.
“Um, yeah.”
“It’s very expensive,” Ai informed me, mock-stern. “She’ll bankrupt us.”
“‘S good though, right? Right?”
“It is,” the muscular girl admitted. Hina purred happily, then her expression soured.
“Man, Yuuka’s being such a jerk. She’d be way nicer if cutie here was a girl, too. That’s not fair at all!”
I recalled that Yuuka had implied something along those lines. Being the subject of such intense and directed misandry felt awful, so I distracted myself with a switch to more practical matters.
“Um, well, about that. She insisted on going on Saturday.”
“Ah. So, three of us?”
“I guess so. I don’t think she has a problem with you going; she just wanted something about her classes.”
Ai nodded. “That makes sense. The rally is in cooperation with environmentalist groups, and Yuuka-chan is a rather extreme…”
“Activist,” Hina supplied. “Eco-terrorist!” She sounded so proud of her teammate.
“Excuse me?”
Ai grimaced. “She thinks of herself as…a protector. Because of everything with Amane. And once we became stronger, a lot of what her eye tells her is…oil in the oceans, rainforests being cut down. She thinks that’s evil. And it is the duty of mahou shoujo to destroy evil.”
“That’s why she was in the Gulf! Because of the rig!”
“Oh.” I was reevaluating her, somewhat. The Vaetna were definitely also classifiable as ecological activists, and yes, sometimes…“Eco-terrorist?”
“Not publicly,” Ai glared slightly at Hina for revealing the information, and I could see why. Another thing to keep straight, to make sure I didn’t accidentally leak.
“Right, right,” the puppy agreed, immune to the judgment. “It’s more of a hobby for her.”
“Um. Got it. Okay. I can’t blame her,” I admitted.
Hina dug a claw into my arm and growled. Not loud enough for Ai to hear, but I could feel it radiate through her torso into mine. It still freaked me out that I found that so attractive.
“I smell sweat. You sparred. Three hours ago, maybe?”
“Y—yeah?”
She looked up at me with those sapphire eyes, pure hyena, pupils tiny—all predator. I shivered.
“I need a piece of that action. Make up for missing last night, and get you ready for Saturday.”
I tore my eyes from her, a monumental struggle, to look at Ai on my other side and ask a silent question with my eyes: from what she and Amane had said, such physical preparation wasn’t necessary, so was Hina just making excuses for her own desires? Not that the butterflies in my stomach cared about whether it was necessary. Ai returned the question with one of her own.
“Last night?”
“Oh, um, she was out—”
“Not sex,” Hina clarified for me. “Just fighting.”
“Not much difference with you,” Ai pointed out grumpily.
“Well, Yuuka’s always so unsatisfying, doesn’t fight back at all, just runs! Need to get some real hits.”
Ai shook her head. “She gets like this, sometimes. Alice would stop her, but…you did want to see how she moves, right?”
I swallowed, unable to deny my excitement to see firsthand how my girlfriend would compare to my idols in combat. I wanted to know just how far beyond me she was. And, in turn, how far I could go, what I might be able to become—a path toward their ilk.
“I do.”