Tenjin and Hakata formed the central heart of Fukuoka. Downtrodden refugees spilled out of buildings and onto the streets, transforming the once-bustling city into a cesspool of ennui and despair.
But life was returning to Kyushu’s de facto capital. Only it was in the form of fear.
“They’re back! The monsters are here!”
“Where the hell’re they coming from?!”
Fires broke out all across the city. Convenience stores, houses, elementary schools, office buildings—everything started to burst into flames seemingly out of nowhere. The source, in truth, were small orbs of light that flickered to life in the sky and fluttered to the ground below. They were small enough to fit in one’s palm, but the moment they touched something, it combusted suddenly and violently.
“It’s gotta be an Anomaly casting spells!” Ijuin surmised.
Separating from his cousin only moments after reuniting, he and the others had run straight for the heart of the panic. Yu had already armorized and sent a surveillance droid to scan the Tenjin-Hakata area.
Ijuin saw what the droid was seeing through a pair of HMD goggles. “Hell,” he groaned. “Not even the Asura Frame’s picking up on what spell this is. I’m not even getting an Anomaly identification!”
“Perhaps it’s concealing itself with magic,” Ein supposed.
Yu nodded. “It’s a likely possibility. I’ll go by air and see if I can’t pin it down.”
“And I’ll cover the ground,” Natsuki said. “Before that, though... Ein, if ya please!”
“Understood,” Ein confirmed. “Fight well!”
—Witness the truth. Envision vajra.
—See, says the Enlightened One, true strength in tathata.
—Give form to invincible serenity, flawless as the full moon.
Ein recited the Gospel Code as beautifully as ever, and the Prayer Wheel at the end of the Mark VI Asura Frame polearm’s shaft began to spin. Adaptive nanofactors spilled out of Vritra’s generator, shaping into auxiliary droids in the form of floating, translucent snowflakes the size of tennis courts—MUV Snow Crystals equipped with freezing liquid helium artillery shells. By the combined power of science and magic, four flowery fractals of ice were created in total.
“Now, time to try out the new guy!” Natsuki cheered.
The next to be born of Natsuki’s Green Dragon Crescent Blade was an aquatic flower of metal about the same size as the Snow Crystals, with forward-facing petals. MUV Water Lily—of these, four were manifested.
The eight droids scattered through the air across Hakata and Tenjin, firing on the blazing buildings—the Snow Crystals with hypothermic artillery and the Water Lilies with high-pressure water jets emitted from the machine’s petals. Normally, the latter would be powerful enough to cut through concrete, but for firefighting purposes, it was tuned down. Through their combined efforts, the fires quickly died one by one. And they achieved all this with the Asura Frame’s own energy, shared completely wirelessly through advanced magnetic resonance technology courtesy of the migrant sages.
“They’ll take care of the fires,” Natsuki said. “Let’s go, Three!”
“Roger,” the Devicer replied. “I’ll cover the air.”
Right now, this was not Yu Ichinose, but Devicer Three, and the voice he used was the very same that Zhou Xueli had once called “fake” and “overly dramatic.”
Taking to the sky, he found that the orbs of light were spawning in intervals of two to three minutes before beginning their descent down to the city. And they were elusive. One second a building was combusting over in the Tenjin area, and the next there were flames by Fukuoka Tower. Yu couldn’t predict them, nor could he even begin to imagine what sort of Anomaly could have created them.
“Rudra, can you sense anything? Magic? An Anomaly?” Yu asked the Frame. “Anything at all?”
No response came. No windows of information, no directions, nothing. It was strange for his partner to be so quiet.
“Shroud!” Yu called next. “Help me search!”
Yu grabbed the scarf around his neck—the Holy Shroud bequeathed to him by Ein—tore a piece off, threw it into the sky, and the cloth separated into little fibers, filling the air like dust. If some magical entity was lurking nearby, Yu trusted the Shroud would find it.
Or at least, it should have.
“What? How?”
The Holy Shroud’s threads drifted in the air—and nothing else. They soon vanished with the wind, the scarf self-regenerating its missing piece. It hadn’t worked. Yu couldn’t believe it, but then he had another idea.
“They’re not hiding with magic,” he murmured. “Rudra! Sound! I need you to pick up footsteps, heartbeats, even the faintest noise!”
A notification reported to Yu that the audio sensors were boosted to maximum sensitivity, and then the Mark III picked up something. The usually inaudible humming of some kind of machine. It sounded almost exactly like antigravity lifters, and adding to that suspicion, the source was even moving through the air.
Baffled, Yu activated his jet stream thrusters and shot towards the origin of the noise. He arrived in an instant, reached his hand out, and grabbed something out of the air. It felt hard and crunched like metal.
“What the heck is this?” Yu muttered.
In his grip was a cylindrical object resembling a cigar, except it was about the size of a metal baseball bat. It had been completely invisible until only a second ago.
Yu didn’t know what to make of it until the Frame displayed a window identifying the item.
“It’s...a MUV Hiding Tinder? It’s an auxiliary droid?!” Yu read the accompanying description. “‘Equipped with optical camouflage and specialized for stealth’?! ‘Used primarily for harassment operations and inciting panic by setting fire to enemy territory’... What Frame is this from?!”
He’d damaged the droid, which must have been why the camouflage had gone offline.
Just then, a commlink came in from Ein.
While Yu and Natsuki were still out searching for the source of the inferno, Ein and Ijuin remained back at Hakata Station to provide support.
“Hm?”
“Somethin’ up, Lady Ein?” Ijuin asked.
“That remains to be seen,” she replied. “The item around the neck of that boy approaching us simply caught my eye.”
Calmly pacing towards them was a young man who looked about the same age as Yu and Ijuin. The prominent and distinguished features on his face were particularly arresting. He was an attractive boy, to be sure, but the look in his eyes betrayed something else, and his hair was a strikingly pure white. The poncho concealing his spindly body was tattered and stained the color of ash. A red scarf was coiled around his neck.
“Devicer Three’s is yellow, but sorta looks the same, huh?” Ijuin said.
“As it should.” Ein’s expression became guarded. “It is a Holy Shroud.”
“Say what?! Then that dude’s a Devicer?!”
The white-haired boy stopped a few paces away.
“Well met, I hope. I do not recognize you, Devicer,” Ein greeted him politely. “Your demeanor tells me you don’t come bearing friendship, but I welcome you all the same.”
“Save your breath,” the boy spat. But a moment of thought later, he seemed to backpedal. “Actually, you and I are going to be seeing each other a lot now, so I guess I should tell you my name. It’s Leo. Makishima. And I’m here for you, Replicant. To put you to use where you belong.”
“That being?” Ein asked placidly.
“With the Mark VII. As my weapon.”
Leo raised his hand, and at the end of his withered and cracked index finger, a light shined. Ein and Ijuin instantly collapsed at a single glance. Their legs gave out beneath them, their bodies convulsing, hearts palpitating and pounding in their ears.
“Wh-What is this?!” Ijuin rasped.
“I suggest you don’t fight it,” said Leo. “The sooner you pass out the better, lazy pig. The Mark VII’s optical hypnosis is no joke, so the aftereffects can get nasty if you try to resist.”
“Don’t you...fat-shame me, you little...!”
Ijuin fell quiet before he could spit out the insult, his consciousness fading. Ein struggled to cling to hers, but in her last few moments of awareness, she managed to send a single commlink.
“Yu! Natsuki! The King of Flashfire—Agni’s Devicer has come to take me prisoner!”
✦ ✦ ✦
Yu was at Hakata Station in a matter of seconds, soaring through the King of the Storm’s realm at blistering speeds. He found Ein and Ijuin on the ground, unmoving, and a small boy standing nearby.
He landed soundlessly and seamlessly between his friends and the stranger. The boy’s hair was white, his eyes wild, but he didn’t so much as flinch.