Of all the Radiances, Yuuka seemed the most universally useful. She was nearly impossible to catch by surprise. Even though she hadn’t foreseen Takagiri escaping the first trap, she’d still been able to avert the magical backlash and gotten it right the second time. I didn’t know much about strategy, but it was clear as day that foresight—precognition, divination, whatever you wanted to call it—was a game changer, the furthest thing from a liability.
At least, when it worked.
“Didn’t fucking see him. That’s all I’m supposed to do, and I didn’t fucking see him. I didn’t see him and now I went down and we’re going to lose and it’s my fucking fault.”
“Hey, Yuuka, no,” Hina urged, scooting closer toward her. “C’mon, we’ve talked about this. Stuff goes wrong! It’s never just your fault.”
“Fuck you. You want to take some of the blame? Sure: this wouldn’t have even happened if you hadn’t fucked everything up! We could have figured this out, gone straight to Sugawara, cut his fucking throat and put all this back in the dirt. But you had to put fifty thousand people in a fucking inferno and you didn’t even get them, you stupid bitch. Why? For him?” She jabbed a finger at me. “And now you’re just gonna stay here and chew on his fucking cock instead of fixing the mess you made?”
She had returned to the vitriol that had characterized our first face-to-face interactions out of anger—and she had a right to feel bad. She even had a right to blame Hina for this whole situation. But that last part? I’d hoped she had come to think a little more than that of me over the past few hours. That got me mad enough to raise my voice in return, speaking over the growl rising in Hina’s throat.
“Chewing on my—no, absolutely the fuck not,” I blurted, then found an actual counterargument. “You’re right, this has gotten to be a total shitshow, and we’re going to fix it. It’s one flamebearer and an…assassin? Whatever she is, there’s four of you, even if your eye isn’t working.”
“It’s not just about the fuckin’ eye,” she grumbled. “They’re ready for us. Those swords cut right through my mantle. And they’re maneuvering well enough to avoid her—” She indicated Hina with a sneer “—she can’t even tell them apart! They’ve been planning this for who-fuckin’-knows how long, and we’re not ready, and innocent people are going to die even if we win, and Alice’s gonna overdo it—”
“Yuuka,” Hina pleaded. “It’s all gonna be fine! They have it under control, you know they do.”
“Do they?” I asked, growing more unsure at the fear and desperation in Yuuka’s voice. “It was looking bad. I, um, don’t really know how this is supposed to go, but…”
“They can’t get you,” Hina soothed. “That’s what matters.”
“He’s not all that matters,” Yuuka snarled. “Fucking Christ, Hina, how can you give so few fucks about everybody else?”
Hina didn’t have an answer for that. I hesitated, then found my voice, trying to meet Hina’s blue eyes.
“I—she’s right. There’s more at stake than just me. There are people in the crossfire and…” As she met my gaze blankly, my heart sank. This wasn’t the right angle to take with her. “You don’t care about that, do you. Not about the humans.”
“You matter more, cutie.” Her voice was soft, earnest. She reached out to me, trying to gently hold my scarred hand.
I pulled away. “No, I don’t. How can—how can you say something like that?”
“Just how it is.”
The thing sitting next to me no longer carried empathy for humans. Her entrance had shown that, but it was far more damning to hear it straight from her lips. Those same lips I’d kissed—a wave of disgust passed through me.
“So you’ll just sit here and do nothing.”
“I’m sitting here and protecting you.”
“That doesn’t make sense!”
“Ezza, there’s no point,” Yuuka sighed. “She doesn’t know how to change her mind.”
“No, there is a point. Hina, this is—you promised to make me more. And I agreed because being more means more ability to help people, to make a difference where it matters. That’s what I want, and you…don’t. You just care about power for power’s sake, because it…feels good, not for something important.” My voice fell to a tired, frustrated groan. “I thought you’d be better.”
That got through to her. She flinched, hunching her shoulders, looking chastised. “Sorry.”
Even through my anger, part of me hated making her so obviously upset. But the point had to be made. “If you’re sorry, then be better. Yuuka and I are—well, we’re liabilities right now. But you’re not. Go help.”
“Okay.” The hyena rose to her feet, ever-light.
“Okay?” Yuuka raged. “That’s all it fucking takes? Years of arguing and screaming at you to clean up your act and he just has to ask once and—” She made an angry noise, punching the nearest pillow. “Fuck you, Hina!”
I winced, but my girlfriend ignored her. “Stay right here, cutie, okay? Don’t—don’t be a hero and get yourself hurt, okay?”
“I won’t,” I replied, privately agreeing with Yuuka’s frustration but not wanting to let it show.
“Love you.”
She waited for me to say it back. Seconds dragged on as I tried to force the words out of my mouth, if only to get her to leave, to do her duty as mahou shoujo. Eventually, I did.
“Love you too.”
They tasted like ash, and I think she could tell I didn’t mean it. She smiled at me anyway. The space around her twisted, and she vanished.
Had I just broken up with my girlfriend?
Don’t think about it.
—
With Hina back in the fray, I should have felt a lot better about just staying here and resting. The room was warm and dimly lit; ostensibly safe. But an awkward atmosphere persisted. That final exchange with Hina had left us both too sullen to be interested in making conversation, and we were both, to put it plainly, rather beaten up from the last few hours of action. Yuuka was obviously mad at how little it had ultimately taken for me to convince Hina to get back out there, and in all honesty, so was I. The whole exchange sat wrong with me, and the acidic Bloodstone Radiance was absolutely the wrong person to talk about it with.
To avoid stewing in the knowledge that Hina and I might now be done for, I instead pondered magic. And there was a lot of magic to think about: Miyoko’s now-ruined bubble, my conversation with Hikanome’s three leaders, the general catastrophe Hina had wrought, and perhaps most significantly, the glimpse I had caught of Yuuka’s silver-sight. Her precognition was such that she could even protect herself from magical backlash. Absurd.
But without it, she thought of herself as useless, a liability, despite having the full suite of other magic all flamebearers could call upon and a decent ability to snapweave. The way she’d spiraled into despair was tragic—and painfully familiar. I understood feeling useless, feeling like a burden; that was my dominant emotional key since arriving in Tokyo. But I could still point out times I’d been useful: I’d saved Holton—though that was another moral nightmare—and helped set up the exit from this inferno, which hopefully people were using even now. And I’d maybe saved Yuuka herself from Takagiri’s follow-up blow. So I could acknowledge my own usefulness, brief and messy as it was—why couldn’t she?
Of course, I wasn’t nearly confident enough to just ask her that directly, especially not when she’d been so prickly just minutes before.
“How’s your eye doing?”
“Fine.”
A better response than the “fuck off” I’d braced for.
“Is it…functional, at all?”
“Why do you wanna fuckin’ know?”
That was more like it.
“Because…it’s unique? Because it’s the most powerful tool in Todai’s box of tricks.”
“Yeah? ‘S that why? Or are you trying to figure out when you can take my spot?”
“Huh?”
Yuuka looked at me angrily, then her face fell. “You saw what I saw. With my arm. You’re stealing my thing.”
“I wouldn’t put it—”
“I fucking bled for this! You can’t just get it for free because you’re so fucking special. No. Not the moment I become useless. It’s not fair.” Her voice was breaking. “It’s not fair.”
For a moment, anger overtook practicality. “That’s not what’s happening! I’m not trying to fuckin’…antagonize you over this. Christ.”
“…I know,” she sighed, her own anger boiling off as she shifted and sat up. “You just make me mad.”
“Well, that’s hardly fair, is it?”
“Nah,” she agreed. “Considering it looks like you just took my side over that thing’s. So I guess we’re just…cool now.”
I really didn’t want to think about Hina, so I ignored that comment.
“I’m not stealing your thing. I promise.”
“Okay. Eye’s…not actually doing that bad,” she admitted. “I know the gauze makes it look fucked, but it’s not really any worse than it was once we got the tunnel open. Just…can’t fuckin’ trust it anymore.”
“Because they can avoid it?”
“Yeah. And it’s been…” she waved a hand in my general direction. “Weird around you. I was thinking it over, y’know, stewing in my shit, and I was realizing that most of when it’s been on the fritz this week was when you were around.”
“Huh.” I collated that with the other stuff I knew as I looked around the dimly lit room, letting my eyes wander. “That…tracks. Your sight and my Flame interact…weirdly, yeah, that’s a good word for it. Hikanome said something along those lines, that I burn bright—like the Vaetna, even, that was the comparison they made. And yeah,” I preempted her scowl, “I know I’m not one—I thought they were bullshitting me, trying to exploit what I care about to con me into trusting them, but—they’re actually true believers, far as I can tell. So I think they’re right in some way.”
“Cool, so you make me even more useless, even if you’re not trying to steal my job. That supposed to make me feel better?”
I gave her a tired look. “Just talking it through, no need to snark at me.”
She didn’t apologize, but did cross her arms below her chest and look away with a petulant hmpf. I took that as a cue to continue talking.
“I don’t think I have your power, Yuuka. That’d be…really fucking unfair, yeah. The Flame wouldn’t just hand me something like that. So I think what I saw was just from…piggybacking on your ability. And I don’t know how that works, but neither do they. Even if they have contingencies for everything else you guys can do, that’s something they’re not prepared for. That’s our edge, if we can figure out how to use it.”
She side-eyed me. “Huh. What happened to not being a hero?”
I glared at her. “Do you want to help or not? Sure sounded to me like you did.”
“Course I do. Don’t talk to me like Alice. None of the fuckin’ ‘you’re a smart girl, Yuuka’ talking down to me shit.”
I avoided her eyes. I hadn’t intended to channel that sort of energy, but it was easy for me to slip into talking down to people—I blame years of interacting with others mostly via explaining magic.
“Sorry. I’ll treat you like an adult, if you do the same and help me with this.”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
She was quiet for a moment, then shifted, raising her hand to the white bandages wrapped around her head. A little blade of magic sparked at her fingertip, and she sheared through the gauze, pulling it off. Her hair had been matted to her forehead and temple by sweat and the dried blood that had crusted around the socket of her eye. She wiped at it gently with some clean gauze, excavating her cursed eye from the messy biological damage surrounding it. Once revealed, the red-and-green gemstone glimmered dully, the low lights of the room catching the raised edges of cracks running along the surface, where the magical organ had fissured under the ripple shockwave of Hina’s initial impact.
“…Depends on what ‘this’ is. You got a plan?”
Despite the bloody mess dominating the right side of her face and the unsettling appearance of her cursed eye, I found it easier now to meet her gaze and actually found myself grinning. The expression soon fled my face after it became clear that she wasn’t quite willing to return it. I coughed.
“Maybe. The eye works?”
“Sorta.”
“…Yes or no?”
“Let’s go with no.”
Aha. “So when you said we were going to lose, was that foresight or just, uh, despair-spiraling?”
“Second. You got me.” She was surprisingly prompt about that; no guilty, embarrassed admission as she reflected on her brief meltdown. I envied her forthrightness. “Can’t see much of anything right now. Which is why I’m fuckin’—”
“Useless, yes, I got it,” I sighed. “Okay, then step one is: let’s fix that.”
I clenched my right fist and tugged on my Flame, letting it ignite into its natural, blindingly white burn that cast a kaleidoscope of too-deep, inky shadows around the room. It hurt, as usual, but there was something—else. I felt a little lighter as the fire ran through me. The consequences of what I’d done to save Yuuka, perhaps. It was secondary to the task at hand, though.
“How about now?”
Yuuka had flinched at the appearance of my Flame, squinting at it with her human eye and reflexively moving her hand to shield the lidless gemstone. She lowered the hand hurriedly, staring at the Flame intently, leaning forward. I’m ashamed to say that after hours of surviving the inferno and our adversaries, my libido was still operational enough to take note of how her boobs shifted with the motion.
“What the fuck,” she declared. “Easily.”
“Then—”
“—we’re not useless.” She took the words out of my mouth. I didn’t yet know her well enough to pick up on the subtleties of her expression, but the ghost of a smile was tugging at her lips as she extracted herself from the blanket and slowly, gingerly rose to her feet, stretching an arm out to the wall for support as she rolled her shoulders. This also moved her boobs, and I wondered if I could use my Flame to shut off the boob-noticing part of my brain somehow—at any rate, she looked fine. The catastrophic damage her mantle had taken seemed to not have bled over to her physical body, though she was moving slowly and gingerly as she finished stretching. “Nerd. You know what, fine. I don’t get what the fuck is going on with you or your Flame, but you’ve got one thing right: I can see. That’s enough. What are we gonna do with this?”
—
What did we know about our adversaries? I’d collated a number of observations from the skirmishing.
Concerningly, they were prepared to fight the Radiances. They both had swords that were able to damage and disable mantles; the mechanism wasn’t clear, but I felt pretty confident that it was some kind of pink disruption effect embedded in the blades themselves. Takagiri seemed able to at least partially avoid Yuuka’s sight, and both of them had displayed significant teleportation abilities, on par with Hina’s. With those abilities together, they’d already demonstrated they could take Radiances off the field. That was bad.
But they wanted to grab me. Alive, even.
“That’s good news for us, isn’t it? Even if they have me, they wouldn’t be able to abscond except through the tunnel, so they’d have to get past us anyway.”
“Silver lining for Hina’s mess,” Yuuka agreed. “It’d make more sense for them to cut their losses and ditch. Then we could focus on evac and all that. But they’re sticking around.”
Even though I’d helped rekindle her confidence, Yuuka’s eye still wasn’t giving us much tactical information. The inferno was still muddying things, and our distance from the actual site of combat—some twenty meters ‘up’ in the fourth dimension from realspace—had reduced her foresight to the broadest strokes and the very short term. We knew our adversaries weren’t going to quit the field in the next few minutes and not much else.
“If we were closer, actually in the shit, I’d be able to see the details,” she sighed. “But you said you’ve already got a plan, so let’s hear it.” She gestured for me to speak as she squatted in front of the mini-fridge. Like Alice’s constant hunger, it seemed that making heavy use of her eye incurred its own cost in metabolic demand.
“Uh. Right. Well, I was thinking about what Hina said. About how the two of them, er, ‘smell the same’. I don’t really know what she means by that, but…” I trailed off as I watched Yuuka extract an energy drink, punch open a hole in the side of the can with another fingertip-blade, and shotgun it. “That can’t be good for you.”
She waved for me to continue. I shrugged. I was hardly one to talk about diet.
“Fine. Based on that and everything else we know, I’m reasonably sure Takagiri’s enhancements are powered by Kimura’s Flame.”
Yuuka launched the empty can across the room and into the rubbish. They hadn’t been here last time, on my date with Hina; she must have added it for me. That made me feel guiltier about our last conversation—don’t think about it.
“Yeah, I’d believe it. Makes sense why she’d be lurking around, waiting for ya, if he’s the primary.”
I nodded. “So we cut the link, however it’s set up. They’ve got pink swords—I figure we can do better than that, some kinda tripwire setup. More like cheese wire, I guess.”
Traps came naturally to Yuuka’s skillset, after all. From what I’d seen of how she fought, it seemed like it’d be easy enough for her to put such a Flame-severing implement in a place she knew Takagiri would be. She grinned. “Taste of their own medicine. And once she’s out, it’s four on one.”
“Not three?” I attempted to raise an eyebrow, failed, and glanced away, reddening. “I mean you’re counting yourself back in it.”
“Yeah. I can do it, but I’ll have to be pretty close to set it up right, and that’s assuming I can even see her.” She scowled. “Any ideas on what that’s about, veeb?”
I groaned at the pejorative—if accurate—term. “Just call me a Vaetna fan. And—no. Silver suppression is solely a Spire thing, not some fuckin’ cult’s. I’ve seen a lot of new magic today, but I’m not gonna give them that much—”
I was thrown sideways mid-sentence. I hadn’t been struck; gravity was betraying the whole room, pillows and blankets and that empty can all flying to my right. Only Yuuka had stayed fixed in place, having {AFFIXED} herself in place on the floor that had become a wall. A jagged, snarled grin had spread over her face. “Guess we won’t have to go anywhere.”
I rolled onto my back and sat up again, raising my still-blazing arm into the air to light the room, hoping it would help Yuuka foresee the attack. It hurt, ice in my veins and fire on my skin, but that was all in my head, so I gritted my teeth and tried to push it further, to grow the Flame to cast as much light—literal or otherwise—as possible. It was all I could really do; with no spear and barely able to stand, it was between this or weaving, and I had much more confidence in Yuuka’s ability to snapweave than my own. Indeed, she’d already summoned her own Flame, globules of it floating out of her eye and coalescing into thread. I was starting to sweat from both the exertion and stress, which made all my raw skin hurt—though not as much as the Flame scorching my hand.
“Know who it is?”
“Kimura,” she muttered. “Was hoping it’d be the other one, but…move left. Edge of the room.”
“My left or yours?”
“Yours.”
I shifted hastily, scooting awkwardly until I was against the wall—formerly floor—adjacent to Yuuka’s. I put my non-flaming hand against it to steady myself and shakily rose to my feet; this was the wrong hand to optimally support my mangled right foot, but it was better than nothing. My repositioning had changed the shadows cast by my hand’s firelight, which Yuuka was watching rather than observing either my Flame or her own.
“Making any difference?”
Before Yuuka could answer, the room shook. Gravity didn’t change this time, but it felt as though something was striking Hina’s little pocket dimension from the outside, and I nearly fell again before digging my good heel into the wall-floor and stabilizing back to a reasonably upright position.
“Yeah,” she declared as the shaking subsided. “I got him.”
“That was you?”
“Uh, no. I mean—eh, fuck it, you’ll see.”
That boded—well or ill, I couldn't say, but it sure did bode.
There was a screeching noise like the scraping grind of a catastrophically crashed car skidding to a halt. It sounded far-off and muted by the walls of the room. The ceiling—now the opposite wall from mine in our new orientation—began to bulge inward. My heart started to race as the sound increased in volume and the bulge grew, swelling with pressure from without. The magic-obsessed part of my brain considered this an ineffective way of breaching the presumably LM boundaries of Hina’s box compared to drilling or a more decisive blast of force—that would have been preferable to watching the pressure inexorably build and build as the sound grew closer, louder, clearer.
I glanced at Yuuka one more time, wordlessly asking for reassurance. She nodded, pointed at the bulge, and gave it a thumbs-down with her silver gauntlet. As if on cue, the grinding suddenly went silent, and the bulge stopped growing.
“Was that you?”
“Wait for it.”
The ceiling burst open. The screeching sound returned in an ear-splitting howl of noise as the temperature plummeted. On the other side of the wound was a kaleidoscopic darkness, distance and direction an incoherent jumble of non-shapes that my brain wasn’t equipped to process. I was looking down, down, down. Vertigo gripped me once again. Without any other way of defending myself from the void, I cowered against the wall and held my blazing hand out in front of me. Its light caught no shape in the darkness, only smoke billowing inward—
Something sparkled across the room. Glittering ruby dust scattered into the smoke, dispersing through it. The granules then burst into crimson Flame, banishing the darkness in a blood-red dazzle that blinded me for a moment. As I blinked away the too-red light, I beheld in my green-dyed vision a figure in robes stumbling backward toward the void from which he’d emerged. Kimura’s re-coalesced form found his footing after a few steps.
Yuuka stepped off the wall to stand between him and me, barking something in Japanese. She was unarmed, but her stance wasn’t that of a martial artist ready to throw down; rather, she held her hand out in front of her like I was doing, a ward to dispel evil—or a gun aimed at an old man. He raised his sword, undeterred, and called out to her in reply as they faced off, samurai versus gunslinger. Framed like that, it was easy enough to imagine the contents of their verbal exchange as cool one-liners: “No further” countered by “stand aside,” or something of the sort…undercut by how sad and tired Kimura looked as he shifted his grip on his sword, like he didn’t want to be here.
Nevertheless, he was the one to strike first. He stepped forward, low—I was surprised to see no sign of Takagiri’s devastating physicality, nor even the jarring, hard-to-follow speed I’d become accustomed to from the mantles. He moved like a human swordsman, stepping closer to Yuuka with grace and slashing at her. Yuuka didn’t have the overwhelming speed of a mantle either, but her precognition was more than enough for a fight like this. She stepped forward and backhanded the flat of the blade away with her gauntlet almost contemptuously while her other fist drove at his gut. One of his hands came off the hilt of his sword to push her fist aside, but he couldn’t fully step out of her reach, backed up against the edge of the torn-open bubble of realspace. He compensated by grabbing her wrist and jerking her even closer, trying to reverse their positions so that she would be the one stuck on the precipice—
Yuuka snapped her silver-clad fingers with a glassy, ringing noise. Kimura’s sword clattered onto the wall-floor, forced out of his grasp by a blood-red spike of LM that had punched straight through his wrist. Then she punched him in the face, and the fight was over.
To his credit, he didn’t just stagger backward off our little island of realspace, maintaining his footing despite the shock of the hole in his arm, but Yuuka’s shove did the trick. Kimura fell through the hole and vanished from view. I breathed a sigh of relief, releasing my Flame and slumping against the wall, breathing on my bone-chilled hand in an attempt to instill some fresh warmth in it. Yuuka scooped up the dropped sword and held it up to her eye.
“Pink?” I managed to ask, magical curiosity barely enough to overcome the systemic discomfort all over my body as the adrenaline ebbed away; the pain and the cold of the outside-space were sapping my strength.
“Think so.” She glanced over the edge, which was too much for me; I squeezed my eyes shut so I didn’t have to keep looking into the abyss. “Hopefully that’s the end of it. I’d be surprised if he can do the smoke bullshit again after the Embers of Ruby. The others will be here soon.”
“Good,” I gasped. I didn’t have the energy to ask about the name she’d given her move. “Can we—close this up?”
“Probably not—”
A whoosh made my heart rate spike again. I snapped my eyes open—and there was Takagiri, hovering just over the edge in front of Yuuka. She’d been seriously roughed up by the other Radiances since last I’d seen her, with one of her forearms sort of…blurry, like something had damaged her wards there. And she looked mad.
“Aw, fuck. Ez—”
“Yeah!” I was already reigniting my hand, yanking the imaginary lever to kickstart my Flame once more. I strangled a whimper in my throat as fresh pain lanced through my nerves. Takagiri launched herself at Yuuka, which was the worst possible moment for my body to finally start deciding it had enough. My vision began to wobble,and I sat back and tried to tune everything out and focus on keeping the fire lit—Yuuka didn’t have a chance otherwise, not without her mantle. Just keep the Flame aloft.
But Yuuka was losing anyway. She was no swordswoman. I heard the sound of blades clashing together once, twice, three times—then the sound of Yuuka grunting and her sword clattering to the ground as a blow landed true. She retaliated with a blast of crimson fire that shone blindingly even through my blurred vision. Takagiri stepped through the magical flame as it sparked against her wards and swung a fist at Yuuka, and time slowed down, as it had before.
My Flame sputtered, and the moment passed without giving Yuuka a chance to avert fate. The blow caught her in the chest and threw her against the wall with a thump. Her impact was only mildly cushioned by the pillows and blankets piled in the corner, and she slumped there, insensate—and probably with shattered ribs, if that blow was anything like how I’d struck Hina. Where was Hina?
Not here yet. We’d already taken Kimura out of the fight, and hopefully the other Radiances were already on their way through fourspace, and then it would be three on one. I just had to survive until then—but as before, Takagiri didn’t go directly for me. She lunged at Yuuka’s crumpled body with a shout, intent on finishing her off this time.
And once again, it fell to me to stop her.
I snuffed my Flame’s external manifestation so the world would stop spinning, and instead channeled it through my body. My muscles were electrified by magic, my vision cleared, and I felt strong as I lurched to my feet. As my mind raced and my senses came alive, some part of me recalled the strategy we’d discussed. I didn’t have to kill Takagiri; I just had to cut off her source of magic from Kimura. We’d speculated that was possible with an information-disrupting pink ripple attack.
Like the sword currently lying on the ground.
The world around me became a blur as I dove for the blade. I felt so fast as I scooped it up—and overshot, skidding toward the open hole. Oops. In that moment of desperation, something in my brain clicked. My flame rushed down my right leg, to my stump, and into the prosthetic. I rearranged the {AFFIX} that bound the mechanism to my foot, binding it to the floor, yanking me to a stop hard enough to have dislocated my hip if magic wasn’t reinforcing my body. It still jarred me for a moment—but only a moment. Then my other foot, the good one, regained its grip, and I used it to launch myself at Takagiri. She’d only just begun to react, still turning to me. None of the blurred speed from before; we were at the same pace now.
Of course, I didn’t really know how to use a sword; even at the same speed, she’d take me apart. So I pushed more of my Flame into my muscles and went faster. I had no idea how much of this my body could take, or for how long—but for a moment I was the lightning. I thrusted with the sword, center mass, my best impression of how I would with a spear. The blade pierced her wards, then her flesh, sinking into her belly and tearing out the side.
And in that long moment, I saw no blood follow the blade out of the wound.
Takagiri wasn’t an enhanced human. She was a construct. A mantle.
The moment passed. I slammed into the wall past Takagiri shoulder-first, not unlike how Yuuka had—but the impact was far lighter than it should have been. I thought that maybe I just didn’t feel the pain when juiced up on Flame like this—then realized I was being pulled away from the wall. My in-the-moment {AFFIX} had knocked loose whatever magic had been maintaining the room’s orientation. Everything tilted until ‘down’ became the abyss.
And we all fell.