Rather than dive into the crowd to go after Takagiri directly, Yuuka simply summoned her Flame once more, weaving quickly and carefully, never taking her eyes off the spot in the crowd where she had “seen” my stalker. I wasn’t having any luck seeing her myself, but that wasn’t a surprise.
“She’s not actually here yet, is she?”
“Nah. I’m thinking…four to six minutes.”
“You don’t know where she is between now and then,” I deduced. “But you don’t need to go after her if you know where she will be.”
“She doesn’t need to be as direct as Hina.” Alice answered from behind us.
I suddenly remembered my worry about her dragon transformation; it had been momentarily overridden by Yuuka’s callout of the threat. I turned toward her and got to my feet—foot—hurriedly, leaning on my makeshift crutch and scanning her up and down, looking anxiously for new mutations.
Radiance Opal was in her mantle, what I understood to be its default outfit: a short, pleated skirt that wrapped high enough around her waist to sit above the base of her tail, a corset that seemed practically moulded to her midriff, and a low-cut blouse held up by straps that crisscrossed over her chest before wrapping around her neck. She wore long, elbow-length gloves; those and her knee-high boots conformed to her limbs so tightly they seemed vacuum-sealed, like Vaetna carapace or similar low-profile armor, an impression aided by the engraved polygonal plating over her knees and elbows and the chunky earpiece riding over one ear. But any militarized aspect to the outfit was undermined by the lacy, yellow trim that appeared all over the outfit and the bejeweled, girly staff she carried.
Maybe it was just my personal sensibilities, but the ornate outfit made it difficult to think of her as a powerful VNT, a walking superweapon. I thought the businesswoman look fit her better; it was embarrassing to be standing next to her decorative getup in front of this crowd. But maybe that was the point? Hikanome’s people seemed to like it, judging by the renewed cheering coming from the crowd.
More importantly—since this was merely a decorative LM construct and not her actual body, what did that mean for her dragon-ka? At a glance, her slit-pupil eyes looked the same as they had before, and she hadn’t sprouted a snout or claws or any other draconic features. She still had her tail, even in this LM facsimile of her body; was that a sign of how immutable the magical limb was, or just an aesthetic choice?
“Ezzen?” She shifted her weight from foot to foot. “You’re looking at me the way Hina does.”
I blinked, blushed, and abandoned the inspection; she must have mistaken the way I was peeking between her legs at her tail for ogling. I’d overstepped the appropriate amount of looking at her body. Embarrassment triggered sweating, despite the chilly air.
“Um—dragon,” I blurted. “Dragon transformation. Dragon-ka. You took a minute.”
Alice shook her head hastily. Her white hair was longer than normal, but only the strands next to her cheeks were free to follow the motion; the back was done up in a very complicated bun clasped by yet more gemstones. I wondered whether the mantle calculated the hair’s physics in real-time with reverse kinematics or if it was some kind of pre-loaded animation. Maybe the latter, since she was oddly still outside of that; when she moved, it seemed deliberate, though not unnatural.
“Oh! No, nothing like that, I’m fine. I was just being careful and taking my time.”
“Oh. Good. Sorry.” After a moment of awkward silence, academic interest won out. “So, that wasn’t the threshold for changes? Do any changes cascade to your mantle? You still have your tail, does that have its own controls or—”
“Ezza,” Yuuka groaned. “Shut up. Trying to concentrate here.”
“And it’s classified,” Alice reminded me, eyes flicking toward the crowd. “Opsec.”
I winced, falling silent and sneaking a glance at how Yuuka’s work was coming along. The thread in her hand was coalescing into a…container, essentially, the schematics to create a box of contained space that would snap shut at a particular moment. Her eyes were still fixed on the crowd; the crystalline one on the right was bleeding more globs of Flame, which were flowing and arranging themselves into concentric floating rings. Lenses, I realized, in the same vein as how Amethyst’s arm cannon deployed.
“Your eye’s got some signal again?” Alice asked.
“Good enough. T minus three for Takagiri. I’ll grab her.”
“Wonderful. Word from Hina?” Alice directed that at me.
“No.” I bit my lip nervously, not wanting to fumble the conversation again. “We saw her getting, uh, tossed around a bit. I know she’s tough,” I clarified, forestalling Alice’s reassuring reply, “just…worried.”
Alice pursed her lips, which led me to deduce that at least the facial expressions were real-time recreations of their real bodies somehow, too diverse and subtle to come from a set of pre-animated options. In their shoes, I’d honestly have preferred to just display emotions with the push of a button, like how Ebi did—though my ideal would be essentially faceless, fully enclosed in carapace and emoting through body language and the tone inflections encoded in Vaetna-chatter. Alice was looking more confused by the second.
“Wait, she’s having trouble? Who was she fighting?”
“Um…didn’t see.”
“Then…it might have been Takagiri she was fighting, not Kimura. She’s the dangerous one of the two; Hina wouldn’t have issues dealing with him. Yuuka, you’re sure that Takagiri will show up here without being in the middle of grappling with Hina, or something?”
“I’d see that,” Yuuka confirmed. “Just her. Two minutes.”
I blinked. “Wait, Takagiri’s human and Kimura’s a flamebearer, right? How’s she the more dangerous one?”
“Kimura’s magic is mostly…well, administrative. He parcels out his magic to the high-level members so they can perform the standard Hikanome miracles. So he’s relatively weak and not a fighter. Takagiri, on the other hand, was one of Sugawara’s elite muscle. Nasty stuff—she was armed to the teeth with magitech and enhanced enough to fight on our level. And now that we know she’s alive, who knows what kind of stuff she’s gotten her hands on in the past few years.”
My anxiety was starting to spike again. That sounded—very bad. It was equal parts upsetting and validating to know that my instinctual danger response when I’d first met her had been accurate. “Then…should we be having this conversation on—the other side of the tunnel, maybe?”
“If it’d make ya feel better. I have her, though. One minute, Alice.”
There was a smile in Yuuka’s voice. She sounded so rock-solid, so certain, that for a moment Takagiri’s capture felt as sure as the rising sun. I blinked at the feeling—leftover white ripple?—and decided not to trust it on its own, glancing at Alice instead for reassurance. She shared Yuuka’s smile and gave me a nod, standing at ease.
“None of that should matter, not against Yuuka. Foresight is overpowered. But confirmation is good too.” She raised a finger to her earpiece and started speaking in Japanese. A chirping warble replied, barely audible to me from right in front of her. I was a little surprised I could hear it, actually—I’d have assumed the Radiances’ mantles were networked to one each other through ways you couldn’t casually eavesdrop on like that. Alice’s brow furrowed.
“Amane’s saying—Yuuka, matte, shimekona—”
She was cut off by the rasp of a sound like tearing paper. Yuuka clutched the lattice of magic in her hand, activating her trap around somebody in the crowd. A cocoon of light spiraled into existence, swirling up and around them and binding their limbs as she manipulated the thread to smother and restrain, yanking them forward out of the crowd and forcing them to their knees. Alice leapt forward into a glide, hovering over the bound figure, yelling at the crowd to back away. The binding threads mummified Takagiri’s body completely, and it seemed like the catch had gone off without a hitch.
Then the bindings tightened further. For a moment, it looked like the tension was too extreme, slicing into the bound figure. I only understood what had really happened in the moments after: the body within had vanished. The cords of light fell in on themselves, collapsing to a single point as the force was no longer resisted, compressing down on itself—just like Hina’s cast-off shards when she’d dove into the bubble. I barely had enough time to realize what was about to happen and throw my arms over my face before the detonation.
But instead of a blinding, deafening, reality-sundering explosion of ripple, all I heard was a grinding pop. Confused, I lowered my hands to peek—just in time to witness Yuuka’s hand burst apart in a fountain of gore.
The backlash had gone directly through the lattice she was holding, the glyphs in her hands shattering with too-pretty sparkles of light as the woven thread overloaded. The backflow overwhelmed the structure and decohered into free ripple directly within her hand—and was then amplified by the inferno. The end of her arm was blown apart from within, disintegrating into a spray of red horror. Time felt like it crawled to give me ample time to witness the catastrophic failure, a twisted warning from the Flame.
But as the moments dragged on and torn-off chunks of flesh glided lazily through the air, I realized it didn’t just feel like slow-motion. Time had gone…wrong. Sparks of free ripple hopped between the flecks of blood and shards of bone like little lightning bolts meandering toward the stump of her arm to ground themselves. Millisecond by millisecond, her fluid gauntlet of raw Flame flickered back to life, a silvery facsimile of how her hand had looked a moment before. It blasted open as well, little shards of silver meeting gore, and then they fell together back toward her stump like asteroids falling dirtward. The gauntlet slammed shut around the ruined meat, and I saw her fingers twitch.
Distantly, I understood that what my eyes were seeing wasn’t reality—somehow, I’d tapped into the same silver possibilities she saw. That gauntlet of her Flame had likely emerged before her hand could burst, not after. Aversion, not reversion.
The period of distorted time ended abruptly and painfully. There was still a shockwave, it had just taken its sweet time to reach me, waiting politely for Yuuka to correct the timeline. The moment I saw those silver fingers begin to move again, the pressure wave struck me like a hammer, knocking the air from my lungs and slamming me to the ground. I gasped and retched, trying to suck in a breath and scramble back to my feet, but for a terrifying two or three seconds, I felt like I was drowning. When I did manage to force a gasp of air, it was labored and ragged as I summoned my spear and wobbled to my foot-and-a-half.
Yuuka had stayed standing. Her body had been rendered whole—or rather never been touched in the first place, as I was still working to comprehend—and she’d promptly stowed it, switching back to her mantle, that overwrought assemblage of dark fabrics and faux-leathers layered together like chocolate pastry dough. While I’d been on the ground, she’d moved to stand in front of me, between me and—
My stalker.
I pieced together Takagiri’s image in motion-blurred glimpses and snippets half-obscured by Yuuka’s body as she rushed toward us. I only really collated these visual snippets after the chaos:
She’d ditched the goth fashion, which was especially apparent against the superfluous complexity of Yuuka’s outfit. This time, she was dressed to kill: combat boots, lightweight and form-fitting segmented khaki body armor—magically reinforced, judging by how she shrugged off something Yuuka shot at her as she approached in a dead sprint—pouches and holsters all along her thighs and torso, and most prominently a sword, a long Japanese katana she carried one-handed.
She dashed across torn-up earth with unnatural speed and force, each footstep sending a spray of dirt behind her. It was like Hina’s movements without any of the weightlessness, bound by Newton’s third law—meaning she demolished her surroundings with the force of her steps. Definitely augmented; the terror I’d felt the first time I’d run into her was validated tenfold seeing her in motion, spiced with a little jealousy. She accelerated into a blur and slashed at Yuuka.
The precog dodged the swing with a lazy step sideways and snapped her fingers, yelling something in Japanese. A beam lanced toward Takagiri from the other side, pale pink and glittery and powerful enough to punch through a regular human. Four more followed it from the center of Alice’s staff. Takagiri twisted and went low so the shots caught her wards shallowly and deflected off rather than making solid connection. A snarl had taken over her face, and she yelled something angrily at the Radiances as she skidded on the dirt to change her trajectory. She turned toward me instead, trying to take advantage of how Yuuka had partially moved out of the way to dodge her first strike, heedless of the subsequent shots from Alice.
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I tried to heft my spear without my right leg collapsing under me. I was still struggling to regain a normal rhythm of breathing, heart pounding a million times a second; adrenaline somehow kept me standing upright as I brought my spear into the ready position, scorched wooden tip between me and the charging assassin. If she slashed, I’d parry; that was all I could do. No paranatural acrobatics for me.
But Takagiri made it only two more steps before an explosion of crimson blossomed around her, hissing against her wards and distorting her silhouette like fuzzy TV static. It hardened around her, bloody sap turning to ruby, freezing her in place in the middle of her lunge, a mask of fury on her face.
“Tsukamaeta,” Yuuka crooned.
“Good work, Bloodstone.”
“Knew she’d go for him.”
I eyed the now-solid crimson block, not willing to lower my spear quite yet. “She’s not gonna—slip out this time?”
As if on cue, Takagiri’s body splintered from within and started to dissolve into smoke. I swore, but Yuuka didn’t react. As the seconds wore on and the dissolution took its course, I realized that this time her encasement in the crystal was so complete that her incorporeal form had nowhere to go; we’d trapped her. The smoke swirled and contracted in odd ways, signs that it was trying to slip out through the fourth dimension—but evidently, it couldn’t escape even along that extraplanar axis.
“Ha!” Yuuka exclaimed.
“Christ.”
“What I’d like t’know is how the hell she’s doing that. Never did it before.”
“At least now we know why we didn’t find a body,” Alice put in.
She was referencing the team’s history with the woman cartoonishly frozen inside the chunk of crystal, but I didn’t care much for that. I was thinking more about what Yuuka had said. “Doesn’t Kimura impart pieces of his Flame?”
That was among the primary functions of the cult’s leaders, to my understanding; part of the draw in becoming a member was the promise that the most faithful and committed could wield their very own sliver of divinity. I could empathize with wanting that, but personally, such a meager scrap would never have satisfied my aspirations toward the Vaetna. Not worth selling my soul.
Anyway, such an arrangement of gifted Flame would make sense for one of Hikanome’s former…assassins? Agents? I still wasn’t entirely clear on what Takagiri’s role had been during Sugawara’s reign, other than that she had apparently been an enemy of Todai. Depending on those details, and how depraved things had gotten within the cult during that period—and the top end of that scale was nausea inducing—other mechanisms for the cloud of trapped smoke in front of us were also possible.
“Could also be a really nasty product of sanguimancy, and that smoke’s her real body,” I continued, more to myself at this point than the others.
Yuuka heard me anyway. “Gross.”
“Hold on. Sapphire lost Kimura,” Opal informed us, finger to her earpiece. “She’ll find him, but we’re staying around here until we have both of them. Amethyst is inbound for overwatch. Heliotrope, Ezzen: keep an eye on our icecube. I’m going to go coordinate evac with…Hongo,” she groaned, lifting a little off the ground into the air on jets of pink fire and looking out at the mass of shivering festivalgoers waiting for the demigods to stop blocking their evacuation route.
Yuuka snickered, which made Alice frown, tail lashing more aggressively now that it could swing freely. “Okay, Yuuka, how about you be the one to—”
A sharp snap split the air. Hairline fissures raced across the block of red gemstone, radiating out from a sword buried halfway deep, stabbed cleanly in. Kimura twisted the hilt of his blade, and the container holding his ally shattered. Alice reacted fastest and sent a bolt of energy directly at him, center-mass—it failed to connect as he shattered into the teleporter trick they kept using, as swiftly as he’d arrived. Smoke-Takagiri rushed out of the cracks and dissipated as well. Yuuka swore. Alice was yelling into her earpiece—and under both of those voices, adrenaline-heightened instinct picked up on the rustling of grass behind me.
I twisted, panic igniting the Flame in my chest. We’d somehow been caught wrong-footed despite Yuuka’s foresight. Potential magical explanations for how our opponents could have suppressed the splash of silver ripple raced through my mind—precious moments wasted on theory when death was just over my shoulder.
But Takagiri’s surprise reengagement wasn’t targeting me. Her sword sank into Yuuka’s upper back and tore downward. The Bloodstone Radiance screamed, her voice distorted and skipping like glitchy autotune as she was hewn open. Takagiri raised a foot and kicked her off the end of the blade—no blood, because the mantle was not true flesh, but the dying-machinery noise of Yuuka’s screams and the awful way she twitched on the grass was proof enough that the blow had done something awful.
I struck Takagiri. It was a shitty jab of my spear, terrible form, basically just flailing; against her wards, it should have been about as effective as trying to pierce a marble with a toothpick. But my muscles blazed with a jolt of Flame-enhanced strength, and the charred tip of my spear was a blur, a lance of desperate, angry force. For just a moment, I felt like Heung, my onyx-tipped spear striking true in vicious retribution.
I wasn’t Heung, of course. The thrust was only able to shove Takagiri off balance for a moment as her wards stopped the blow. But that was long enough for Alice to tackle her.
“Tackle” is just my best after-the-fact approximation; it was more like a white-hot fireball struck Takagiri so hard she vanished from my field of view, leaving me instinctively wincing at the wave of heat and blinking away the retina-burning afterimage of Alice’s incandescent form. I suddenly understood why one of her nicknames on Wikipedia was “Lighthouse’s Beacon.” I’d felt her burn hot before, but now she was blindingly incandescent.
After a long second of processing what had just happened, my eyes followed the twenty-meter-long trench of scorched dirt. At the end was a figure—too bright to look at directly—grappling the assassin, whose wards had reduced her figure to a blurry, noisy mess in their efforts to keep Alice’s aura from roasting her alive.
Yuuka screamed again, more of a garbled groan, and I tore my eyes away from the struggle. Alice would be fine; two more Radiances were on the way, and I couldn’t help with the fighting anyway. But maybe I could help Yuuka. She lay there motionless, helpless, her strings cut. My mind raced as I knelt shakily by her, trying to call up my understanding of the mantle’s core mechanisms, to guess where and how the underlying weave had been damaged, to intuit the precise way to patch the damage and at least stabilize her. No brilliant flash of insight appeared before me.
“I’m—gonna give it my best shot,” I promised her as I laid down my spear and gathered my thread, voice shaking with the realization that I should have practiced snapweaving {MANIFEST}; with the Radiances, it qualified as basic field medicine, and I wasn’t even prepared for that. But I still had to try to help her. She was staring at me out of the corner of her human eye as she lay face-down in the dirt and groaned something. It just came out as random noises, not even human-sounding—but I knew an agonized plea for help when I heard it. I took a deep breath, steeled myself in the feeble ways I knew how, and reached out to her to perform a miracle—
I never got the chance to try.
A hand grabbed my hair and tugged hard enough to make my eyes fill with tears. I was yanked away—not horizontally, not up, not even down into the ground. Out, across an axis that should not exist. The world around me jerked and twisted and shriveled, Yuuka’s prone body and the grass and everything moving further away, becoming flatter and smaller as my feet left the ground. She groaned again, and this time, I heard the word she’d been trying to say, robotic and out of tune but comprehensible as I was pulled into the icy void outside reality.
“Ki—mu—ra.” She had tried to warn me.
Everything was the sky and the sky was the abyss. Too high, my instincts said—the direction I was being pulled wasn’t something my body understood, but vertigo arrived anyway. Nausea rushed up my gullet, made into panic by the fact that nothing was happening when my body tried to breathe in. I reached for my spear, my source of safety—it had been left next to Yuuka’s body. Stupid. I thrashed with my Flame instead, trying to burn the man dragging me through the cosmic ocean by my scalp.
A muffled thump all around me, and the grip vanished, and I saw some kind of shadow pass over the distance-flattened image of reality in front of me—then the world rushed toward me again, shifting and slanting as I was moved in four dimensions at once.
I crashed out of the water, back into what my body understood as three-space, landing in a heap. The hard arrival jarred me; I rolled onto my side on instinct, clutching the back of my head in response to the throbbing pain and retching as my body tried to cough up water that didn’t exist. I thrashed at something touching my chest and face.
“Cutie! Hey, no, it’s okay—”
Something ice-cold sparked against my chest, and thrumming energy surged outward from my core into my limbs. I coughed one last time as the sensation of water in my lungs finally disappeared. Everything hurt, inside and out, but a warm breath on my cheek got me to at least open my eyes and take in the environment around me.
Hina was kneeling over me, hand on my chest, forehead against mine. I coughed out of embarrassment rather than somatic necessity.
“Fuck. Ow.”
“Hey. Hey,” she repeated. “You’re okay.”
“Am—that was the void. The outside.” The space beyond space, the rest of the hypercube of reality beyond our little three-dimensional world.
“He tried to grab you. But I got in front of him.”
“Thanks.” I took a deep breath. Having solid ground beneath me never felt so good. “Wait—Yuuka. She’s hurt. She’s—”
“She’s okay. So are you. Shhh.”
I finally registered where we were. I hadn’t been dumped out on the grass; Hina had dragged me into her pocketspace, her little enclosed lounge floating in the void. Safe, warm, dry, dimly lit.
“Can—can they get in here?”
“No.”
I let myself believe her.
A groan came from behind me. I twisted, whimpering at the aches the movement generated, and saw Yuuka curled up under a blanket on the far side of the room, glaring at us through one good eye. Her crystalline eye was fully hidden under fresh layers of gauze wrapped around her head. Had the wound to her mantle harmed her real body, too?
“You’re—okay?”
“Didn’t even see him. Shouldn’t be fucking possible.”
Not really an answer to my question, but if she was feeling good enough to spit invectives, I figured that boded well.
“Not your fault,” Hina soothed, which made Yuuka’s lips curl.
“Your—your mantle,” I whispered. Yuuka frowned impressively.
“It is. Bitch got me. Emergency disengage got stuck.” Her good eye flickered from me to Hina, then back to me. “You tried.”
“I…don’t think I’d have been able,” I admitted. I’d been at a loss, overwhelmed by the task of saving a life with magic. “Should’ve—been more prepared. Should’ve known what to do.”
That got a humorless, angry chortle from her. “That’s two of us.”
Hina gently pushed me back down onto the spread of blankets and ran her fingers through my hair.
“You did fine, cutie. Nice stab.”
Oh. I’d done that, hadn’t I? Supercharged my body with magic again. I reflexively opened my mouth to justify the use of blood magic—then realized I didn’t need to, not with Hina. I settled a bit further down into the nest of blankets and allowed her hand in my hair to soothe the adrenaline-tinted chaos of what had just happened.
“It’s so pretty.”
I looked up at her, some dry amusement managing to unburrow from the fresh load of trauma it had been buried under. “That’s where your head’s at?”
“I’m not leaving you alone again,” she murmured.
I frowned. My body was starting to recognize I was safe here with her, and a sudden surge of exhaustion washed over me, amplified by the warmth of the room after the cold of the park and then the frigid abyss. I wanted to just leave the rest of this to the Radiances. But that moment of power when I’d struck Takagiri lingered in my mind. I had made a difference. I wanted to do so again.
“They’re fighting out there, yeah? We have to help.”
“I shoulda just put you in here to begin with but I didn’t and you got hurt and it’s just better if you stay out of the way until we finish this,” Hina rambled. Apparently, everybody was ignoring my questions right now. “I really just thought I’d get him on the way in and this wouldn’t turn into…yeah. He’s way slipperier than he should be.”
Silence fell for a few seconds until I groaned, blinking and rubbing my scalp. It had felt like Kimura was trying to tear my hair out. Couldn’t he have grabbed me anywhere else? Hina’s blue eyes followed my hand.
“They both are,” Yuuka muttered eventually, sounding angry. “Her getting out of the bindings, sure, but the shit with Kimura?”
“You did the shibari thing?” Hina asked.
“…Ugh. But…yeah, and she just—poof. Musta been an actual blink, not a hop. I got her the second time with a full encasement, but then the old guy showed up and just…” she trailed off into a frustrated growl.
“They’re as mobile as you are,” I told Hina. “But…that shouldn’t be possible, not really. Him, sure, but her? She shouldn’t be able to blink like that, not as a human. We were thinking it might have been some really nasty blood magic.”
Hina shook her head. “Nope. I’d be able to tell. She’s augmented, but it’s just gear, not like me or something messier. But you know what’s weird?”
I waited for her to continue the thought, but she didn’t, just stared expectantly at me with those big, blue eyes. I sighed. “…What’s weird?”
“She smells exactly like him.”
I nodded; that explained some of it. “So he did impart some of his Flame to her. Which means there’s a link we can sever to cut off her abilities,” I deduced, proud of the admittedly basic strategy. “And maybe stop them from blinking around like that. If nothing else, it’d at least turn the fight from a…two versus three to one versus three. I think. If you’re staying here with me.”
“There’s no third,” Hina clarified. “Yuuka’s out of it too.”
“Why? Even without her mantle, her eye is—practically unfair. Shouldn’t—”
“It’s fucked too,” Yuuka interjected. I frowned and waited for a clarification, but none came; the fresh bandages on her head spoke for themselves. I thought for a minute, then found the moment in the chaos that was bugging me.
“Maybe…that’s not a problem. Your arm. I saw you—avert it?”
Yuuka stared at me. “What the fuck?”
“I did, I swear. Silver.”
“What? No. Fuck off,” she spat, and rolled onto her side, evidently unwilling to entertain what I was saying.
“Huh?” Hina leaned in toward me, curious. “You saw her stuff?”
I winced. “Don’t…say it like that. I got some…bleed-over from her precognition? I don’t know what to call it, but I did see it. Hold on—you’re not going to help?”
“I want to finish what I started,” she muttered, avoiding my eyes as a bit of a growl entered her voice. “But I’m not leaving you. You could get hurt. They’re not allowed to do that.”
“Do—can Amane and Alice actually beat them, two-on-two?”
“Yeah,” said both of the girls, but Hina was still not meeting my eyes, and Yuuka’s heart didn’t sound in it.
“While assisting with the evacuation? What happens if Alice gets hurt and the tunnel collapses. Or—” my stomach lurched. “Yuuka, the tunnel is based on your LM. Which Takagiri fucked up pretty bad. Is it even still open?”
“…I don’t know.”
“It is,” Hina confirmed. “Humans are on their way out.”
“That’s a relief. But even so—Alice’s magic is what’s holding it open, and she turned into a fireball after Yuuka got hit. I—she’s going to trigger her dragon-ka, if she hasn’t already.”
Both of the Radiances reacted in subtle ways. Hina whimpered; Yuuka inhaled. The room was so unnaturally silent that I caught both; I wouldn’t have normally. My heart sank; if they agreed with me, then the risk was very real. But that made what I was saying all the more important. I pressed on.
“And…Takagiri and Kimura. They’ve both been way exceeding your expectations, yeah? From what I’m understanding. Capabilities we didn’t expect. They got past your sight, Yuuka.”
“Fuck you. Amane can handle it,” Yuuka insisted, something dangerous in her voice.
I winced. “…Not made of glass. I know. But—neither are we. We should help. We have to help.”
That set her off.
“You’re trying to be the hero?” She snapped. “Trying to be the Vaetna, solving our problems for us? If those cunts are too much for us, they’re way too much for you. You’re not a Vaetna. You’re not even one of us. The only reason you’re still alive is because they want you alive, for whatever reason, not because you can keep up.”
“I hit her! I’m not made of glass either.”
“Only because she went for me. You weren’t fast enough for her. If you go back out there, you’re a liability—”
I bristled. “Don’t fucking call—”
“—and so am I.”