Chapter 2: A City on the Sea

1

Yu and Ein blitzed through the thickly wooded and rocky Kyoto-Osaka area in a fraction of the time they had taken to make the journey on foot. The Mark III, still functioning properly for the moment, carried them the entire length in under half an hour. The healing magic had worked wonders for Yu’s condition, and now his only worry was the exposed girl riding behind him.

“Are you cold?” Yu asked, raising his voice over the wind. “Can you breathe okay?”

“I’m well,” she replied. “The Asura’s Aerocite—that is, the anti-gravity lifters—can create fields of gravitational effect. Feel free to increase our speed. I’m more than protected.”

“Will do!”

The sunken remains of the Osakan megalopolis swept beneath them until they came to the ocean proper, where Osaka Bay would have normally begun had it not swallowed the city and become the Great Kansai Bay.

They cut across the sea, when something caught Yu’s attention on his display. “A message,” he said. “From the colony!”

“‘Welcome home, our prodigal son,’” Ein repeated the commlink aloud. “It seems they’re glad to finally have our location.”

The Mark III soared over Wakayama Bay at last, the navigation system guiding their flight and indicating their location with a glowing indicator on the map. Every second brought them closer to Nayuta, and Yu’s heart leaped at the prospect of seeing his friends again.

“Hey,” Yu said. “I’m picking up gunfire.”

His sensors captured the distant crack of assault rifles, and a new window streamed footage of a ship parked on the water. It didn’t look big enough to be a destroyer, but it definitely belonged to the Naval Defense. A patrol boat, most likely. Fairly modest in size, at fifty or so meters in length.

The crew had come under attack by a wooden sailboat. Anomalies scurried across a long, aged gangplank connecting the two ships, wearing tattered clothing and wielding shortswords and hand axes. In fact, their forms looked very familiar.

“Are those humans?!” Yu exclaimed.

The disturbingly hominid faces of the archmages he had faced over the last few hours passed through his mind, as well as the nauseating possibility that these Anomalies shared those similarities. But a closer look at the enemies and the ship they were boarding from relieved his concerns.

“Yu! That crew is not alive!” Ein warned. “The pirates are undead, and the sailors won’t last long using conventional weaponry!”

The rogues shambling from the rotten and decrepit sailboat were zombies. Flesh hung from their bones, exposed and decaying, or at least from those that still had flesh, anyway. They weren’t at all fast and shuffled onto the modern patrol ship languidly, swinging their weapons around at the crew. The sight belonged on seas halfway across the world, centuries prior.

The officers, distinguished somewhat by their blue fatigues, countered with desperate machine gun fire, turning the already emaciated zombies into even gorier creations. But without delivering a decisive blow to the heart or head, it would do them little good.

And failing would yield nightmarish consequences.

The undead pirates moved dully, but it was matched with indomitable strength, and if one got too close to an unfortunate victim, it was only a matter of time before a set of yellow teeth would be sinking into their sinews. And there were so many of them. They seemed to spawn infinitely from the sailboat.

“It’s...saying the ship itself is an Anomaly,” Yu murmured.

“That’s right,” Ein replied from behind. “It births the monsters. Until their cord is cut, the dead will continue to walk.”

The HMD in Yu’s visor listed the Anomaly as a “ghost ship” and designated its threat level BBB.

“We need to help them,” Yu said. He hovered above the embattled ships. “We need to help them...but I can’t even tell who’s who down there!”

The Mark III, fifty meters in the air, counted eighteen enemy zombies on the patrol ship’s deck. Twenty-two officers—twenty-one in the time it was taking Yu to think.

He had to act fast.

The skirmish was chaos. Firing a weapon or deploying droids haphazardly would only endanger fellow humans. But he couldn’t take out each zombie one by one. He didn’t have that kind of time.

“Do we release the droids?” Ein asked urgently.

“No,” Yu finally responded. “It’d take too long. I have a better idea.” He unlatched the droid Ein was riding from his back. The MUV Airmobile was originally used to transport auxiliary troops or special forces, so as long as it had a source of power and propulsion, it could fly rather reliably on its own. “Will you be okay by yourself? I don’t want you to fall.”

“In my home kingdom, Aerocite was used to lift entire cities,” said Ein matter-of-factly. “A single droid is nothing. I could float here for a hundred years!”

Convinced enough to leave her to her own devices, Yu descended to the deck. Rapidly. The full-armored Mark III landed harshly on one knee with enough force to send a reverberating thud throughout the patrol ship, but it was almost perfectly silent. A feat made possible by the anti-gravity lifters. And just as well. Neither friend nor foe had taken note of Devicer Three’s entrance.

“Okay. Mark III, I need the, uh, inca...pacitative...” Yu searched his brain for the thing’s name. “Incapacitative...paralytic? Sound propagator?”

At the final utterance, the weapon activated and a horrible, grating whine resonated from the incapacitative paralytic sound propagator in the nano-armor’s chestplate. Anything with a nervous system would fall into shock upon hearing it and temporarily go limp, thereby non-lethally subduing any potentially violent individuals. Of course, that included the men on the deck. The twenty-ish navy officers collapsed on the spot at the atrocious sound, like metal shrieking through glass.

They fell twitching, faces frozen in looks of horror as they realized that their hero, Devicer Three, had just attacked them. The one they should have been able to trust above all else.

Yu’s plan was going swimmingly. He stood, stretching out his droid-enhanced arms and spreading the elongated fingers of the MUV Crow Gauntlets. From each of their tips, superhardened calcium bullets erupted, propelled by hyper-compressed bursts of air. The attack didn’t even need the Full-Armor form. It could be used with the base Frame.

Crackling gunfire filled the air, a storm of bullets turning the zombies into hole-ridden ant hills from the chest up. The invading pirates’ hearts and brains were minced in a matter of seconds.

The paralyzing sound had only been to keep the sailors out of harm’s way. The undead, conveniently, didn’t have functional nervous systems.

“Three,” one of the fallen men gasped, realizing the Devicer’s intent. “This was your plan.”

“You were trying to protect us,” another murmured.

Tears brimming with emotion welled in their eyes. But Yu still had a job to do.

He kicked into the air once more, just above the undead-spawning ghost ship. Even as he did so, the door to the hold opened and a new mob of Anomalies came pouring onto the sailboat’s deck, unsteadily making their way towards the patrol ship.

“Holy Shroud! I need you!” Yu cried.

The ends of the scarf around Yu’s neck spread out like the wings of a bird before poofing out a cloud of sparkling particles which glowed the same yellow hue as the cloth that had scattered them. The golden smoke swallowed the ghost ship whole, each speck of dust a piece of the Holy Shroud itself. And despite the weapon’s mysterious nature and its seemingly endless abilities, one thing was certain about it—it felled the undead decisively.

Both the zombies and their ship crumbled, evaporated by the Shroud’s purifying dust.

As the paralysis started to wear off, the officers began to whoop and cheer.

“Three! Number Three! You’re alive!”

“Hey!” one of them shouted particularly frantically. “It’s me! Sakuma! Where the hell have you been, Mizuki?!”

Men began to stumble to their feet, pointing at the Mark III in the sky, and one young officer even seemed to have known Devicer Three personally. Yu’s heart skipped a beat. Shinichi Mizuki had been his name. The name of the Devicer Three before him.

There was no point in lingering. Yu returned at once to where Ein was waiting for him, rejoined with the auxiliary droid, and accelerated towards Nayuta.

“Wait!” the man shouted. “Mizuki! Listen to me!”

The stranger’s voice seemed to chase after him with as much tenacity as the archmage’s had.

About twenty minutes later, the Mark III alighted on the roof of Central Tower, the floating city centered around it blanketed in night. Yu let Ein down, then de-armorized.

“Guys!” he exclaimed. “You’re still up?”

“You think we’d be sleeping while you were still out there?” Aliya scoffed, then smiled. “We haven’t made it until we’ve all made it.”

“I believed in you, bud! I knew you two were gonna be okay!” Ijuin cheered.

“So what happened out there?” Natsuki asked. “You better have brought a good story back with you at least.”

They were all there. Waiting for him. Ijuin, ever the softy, held his fist out with tears in his eyes. His partner, the friend he had experienced every joy and sorrow with for the last year, bumped it with his own fist, and the two nodded at each other.

The journey was finally over. Yu had never felt a smile on his face quite as nice as this one.

Meanwhile, Ein stared past them. “So you are Nadal,” she said. “One of the five Wise Ones in service to my mother.”

She regarded the spindly elf curtly. She saw through his fine features, his disciplined, buzzed hair. The look in his wide eyes did little to hide the peculiarity behind them.

“How grateful I am to see you well, Your Highness,” the sage replied. “Honored am I that you grace us with your presence.” He was wearing a hooded robe, folded at the front like a kimono. The more Yu looked at it, the greater his suspicion grew that he’d seen it before. In a famous sci-fi film. His tone and speech were practically oozing pretension. “We find ourselves in a state of emergency. A state of great need for the noblesse key to Avalo and the Astral Library therein. As such, we will have much use for you and the new Devicer Three.”

Yu blinked at the man’s stark words. “U-Use?”

Ein shrugged, seemingly accustomed to the pompous diction of those in power. “You never change,” she sighed. “Pay him no mind, Yu. He simply subsists on being rude, juvenile, and utterly asinine. For a man-child, though, he’s remarkably shrewd. Try to be courteous.”

“Uh, sure,” said Yu.

“Indeed, my insight is as valuable as gold,” Nadal boasted. “And my first wise decree is that you are to undergo a physical examination tomorrow morning with our Asura Frame and nanomedicine specialists. Understood? Don’t forget now.”

Ijuin’s warning suddenly ran through Yu’s head.

“I wouldn’t stay armorized for long periods of time. I got this weird feeling while I was digging around.”

“An image. A bad one. Like gears that don’t really fit together. You’ll probably be fine in ten, twenty-minute bursts, but if you keep it up for hours at a time, we might, uh, have some trouble.”

A mere forty minutes of battle had been enough to cause Yu to black out. Whatever this condition was, it wasn’t good.

2

Yu had arrived at Central Tower at approximately one in the morning, so when he and his friends found their guest rooms on the fifty-fifth floor, it didn’t take long for sleep to take them. Each room was fully powered, and even came equipped with air conditioning and a refrigerator. But the final blow for Yu had been the hot shower. After that, he was out before his head had even hit the pillow.

Modern society was alive and well. How he had missed it.

The next morning at eight, Yu pried himself from his dreams to meet the others at the cafeteria on the same floor as their rooms. It was packed but otherwise very neat and clean.

He spotted Ein, Ijuin, Aliya, and Natsuki in a corner and carried his tray of food over to their table, then wasted no time testing the fare.

“Oh my gosh, I haven’t had a cucumber sandwich in forever,” Yu moaned as he chewed. “The veggies are so fresh, and the margarine might as well be butter. I could cry.” He took another satisfying bite, finding the cucumbers moist and crunchy. His salad plate was a colorful canvas of vegetables. “They seriously synthesize all this in the tower?”

Aliya nibbled on her BLT, sans the B. “Mmhmm. Sixty floors in total, but most of them are used for manufacturing,” she answered. “Vegetables, meats, dairy products—even milk. And it’s not just food either. Anything someone would need to get by in daily life, they make it.”

Used to be a lot of places growing plants indoors, Yu thought to himself. He was a bit of an oddity for a fourteen-year-old, in that he preferred vegetables to junk food and cooked for himself more often than not.

“Okay, but this synthetic meat’s dryer than a desert and smells like medicine,” Ijuin griped. “Some real meat’d be nice.”

Ijuin, on the other hand, was firmly in camp carbs-and-fat supremacy, and was consequently displeased with the menu. Every bite of his white imitation burger made his shoulders sag a little deeper.

Natsuki grimaced at her own meal. “Yeah, thing kinda looks like an overcooked, underseasoned chicken breast.”

“An integral part of the sage’s path is the spiritual abstention from meat,” Ein explained. Her grin widened. “Our people aren’t very carnivorous in nature to begin with, so one can hardly trust them to replicate it with any degree of accuracy.”

Ijuin seemed to take personal umbrage with the clone elf’s delight at her precious, Naruto Kintoki-grade sweet potato.

“I mean, there’s other humans here besides us, right?” he grumbled. “Would it kill ’em to let the experts bring some stuff in? Like, come on, I’ll even take fish.”

“Sorry, but no,” someone chimed in melodically. A sage woman sat nearby. The hem of her flowing, blue robe, draped over a long dress, brushed against the floor. She was beautiful, naturally, but there was a kind of gentleness in her countenance that accentuated her youthful glow. “This is a holy place—mere paces away from a Wheel of Orison—and we conduct ourselves with respect and reverence in such company. Is that understood?”

“Er. Yes, ma’am,” Ijuin said at once, defeated by the tiny woman’s verbal prowess. “Sorry, ma’am.”

The migrant elf smiled, satisfied, and turned to Yu. “I’ve heard of you, Yu Ichinose. The Devicer who awakened Rudra, the Asura of sky. And you.” She looked at Ein. “Your face is one I remember fondly.”

“As is yours, it seems,” the Replicant girl replied. She was silent for a while as she searched her memory. “You are High Priestess Azalin, one of my mother’s Wise Ones. Am I correct?”

“Correct you are,” she said. “Currently, I supervise matters regarding the twelve Asura Frames, and I suppose you could call me the caretaker of the temple.” Azalin gracefully lowered her head. “To the artificial gods of destruction.”

“Still can’t believe it.” Ijuin took in the fresh outside air. “Prayer Wheels. The Asura Frame’s power source. Some crazy stuff, huh?”

A massive wheel of fifty-five meters in diameter slowly turned in front of him. The metal framework around it almost made it look like a Ferris wheel without gondolas. Massive though it was, the structure was actually quite understated, especially sitting behind the three-hundred-meter Central Tower.

Ijuin huffed in excitement. “Man, but just look at that thing! It’s just like the one on the Mark III!”

“Except the Mark III’s is a real one. A Wheel of Orison brought all the way from Param on the other side,” Aliya elucidated smartly. “Small enough to fit on a belt, powerful enough to generate more energy than an entire power plant, and with absolutely zero emissions. It can turn wind, sunlight, water currents, even gravity waves into electricity and mana. There’s a reason the elves consider it a national treasure.”

“But what’s this ‘Wheel of Orison’ business about?” Ijuin tilted his head. “What’s that mean?”

“Exactly what it sounds like,” Aliya stated matter-of-factly. “The souls of elvish sages, monks, and high-ranking priests from all throughout history reside in it, and the forces of the natural world—earth, water, fire, wind, and the void—fuel them, turning their prayers into power. Apparently you can even hear it chanting sometimes.”

“And this big fella is the Earth equivalent,” Natsuki remarked, studying the oversized, mock Prayer Wheel with interest. “I’m gonna assume bigger doesn’t mean better, does it?”

“Unfortunately not,” said Aliya. “It’s far less efficient than the Mark III’s, or any of the Asura Frames’ for that matter. They had to make a lot of concessions and contrivances to replicate the originals, and as you can see, it came at the cost of portability.”

“Hey, if it works!” Natsuki casually grinned. “Even doubles as a tourist attraction. And if the ghost priests say we can’t have meat or alcohol, then not much we can really do to argue.”

“I hear doing that can actually decrease its output,” Aliya murmured.

Ijuin sighed heavily. “Ugh, fine, I’ll suck it up.” He looked up, but not at the Prayer Wheel. He turned towards Central Tower behind him. “Wonder if everything’s going all right with Ichinose.”

Yu and Ein had gone to the medical center with High Priestess Azalin. The other three had come to check out the Prayer Wheel to kill time in the meanwhile, but one could withstand only so many tedious revolutions of the big turbine before going insane.

They wrapped up their sightseeing and were heading back around to the entrance, when Natsuki perked up. “Army guys. And they look even more uptight than usual.”

A few dozen uniformed Defense Force officers were gathered at the tower’s front door. A military truck was parked nearby.

Ijuin, familiar with machinery as he was, took one look at it and frowned. “It’s not electric. They’re seriously driving that thing around?”

“It’s gas-powered? In today’s world?” Aliya said, flabbergasted. “Where are they even getting fuel from? International trade’s dead and Japan can hardly make its own without importing oil.”

“Old ‘patriots,’” Natsuki said sarcastically, “tend to have trouble adjusting to change.” She shrugged. “Could be that they ran here quick and never saw things get bad on the mainland. If that’s the case, I could totally see them burning all that gas thinking everything’ll be back to normal any day now.”

“That sounds depressingly plausible,” Aliya moaned.

“Actually, I remember seeing a Naval Defense ship at the harbor too,” Ijuin added.

The self-proclaimed ex-high schooler was as detached as ever, but the younger middle schoolers felt an indescribable foreboding in the air, and looked at each other with concern.

“The Mark III belongs to your people, right?” Yu remembered Aliya telling him as much. “But I think it’s fused with my body. Will you be able to take it out?”

“Oh, of course we can,” Azalin assured him in her cute, melodic voice. “We’ll pluck Rudra’s nanofactors right out and leave your own body perfectly intact. It would be rather hard to conduct maintenance otherwise, don’t you think? Why else do you think you’re here?”

“In that case, you can keep it,” Yu said flatly. “I’m returning it to you.”

The Asura Frame belonged with its legitimate owners. Yu’s claim on it had ended. Their long and treacherous journey was over. He didn’t need it anymore.

He wanted to believe he didn’t need it anymore.

Azalin’s soft features twisted in shock. “But you and the Asura are one,” she said, pitch rising. “Don’t you feel strong together? Why in the world would you want to sever that bond?”

“I’m inclined to agree with her,” Speaker Nadal interjected. “Yu Ichinose, the fact of the matter is we don’t want you to return it.”

They were on the fiftieth floor—Central Tower’s nanomedical facility. Yu lay on a bed, dressed in a blue patient’s gown, while some kind of device scanned his body. An MRI for nanomachines, apparently.

“It would be squandered in anyone else’s hands, meaning yours are where it belongs. It’s only logical. Don’t you agree?” Nadal never looked up from the monitor, analyzing Yu’s combat data. “After all, what would we be without logic, reason, or sophism?”

“Regarding the latter,” Ein said from the other bed, “I’m fairly certain my mother’s answer would be, ‘better people.’”

She was attached to the same device as Yu and wearing the same outfit. Her quip had given Yu the momentum and courage to press further.

“Just because I can use it doesn’t make it mine though,” he argued.

“Semantics. It’s not that you can ‘use’ it,” Nadal shot back. “You can harness it.”

Everything Yu had seen, everything he had heard, everything he had fought with the Mark III was being replayed at high speed for the sage. Various graphs described his velocities, power and magical energy outputs, as well as a myriad of other combat-relevant sets of data. On top of the endless diagrams of environmental statistics and figures, the amount of information was nauseating, but Nadal needed only three minutes to review every bit of it.

A screen saver replaced the data on-screen and Nadal finally looked at Yu.

“The numbers speak for themselves,” he said. “You’re better. In every aspect. All across the board, you eclipse your predecessor, upon whom I refuse to waste the calories to remember his name. And that is because, by design, the Asura Frame is only as strong as its bond with the Devicer.”

“Nadal, that man died a warrior’s death,” Ein interrupted sharply. “Show him due respect.”

“Apologies,” Nadal replied flippantly. “Anyway. Yu Ichinose, Rudra has chosen you, and as such your heightened parameters are to be assumed. The more statistically significant difference between you and your predecessor is your combat experience. You see, the prior Devicer toured with the Asura for two years and five months.” His eyes sharpened. “And yet, your resourcefulness, adaptability, awareness, your judgment on the battlefield—they all exceed his own. Few Devicers have ever been able to harness the Asura Frame quite like you can.”

Azalin nodded. “He might even be on the same level as Avalo’s guardian, Devicer Nine.”

Ein’s very being seemed to swell with pride. “Isn’t he amazing? I saw those exact qualities in him myself,” she bragged. “And they’re precisely how he won over the Asura, as well as my heart. I can imagine no partner more worthy to bear the King of the Storm’s armor.”

“S-Stop giving people weird ideas,” Yu stammered.

Yu’s suffering, however, was Azalin’s delight, and her eyes suddenly shimmered. “Oh, goodness, I had no idea you two were involved like that! That’s so romantic!”

“Your Highness, should you feel the need to fornicate, please do so outside the tower’s premises,” Nadal commented without missing a beat. “Sages are known to sire children, of course, but we keep our animalistic tendencies away from holy grounds. Or otherwise in a lab where artificial fertilization can take place.”

The speaker had hardly even blinked when the door to the testing room opened and a young man, a human, barged in. His black jacket, white button-down, and necktie identified him as being from the Naval Defense, and according to the rank depicted on his arm patch, he was a captain.

“Speaker!” he shouted. “Where is Devicer Three?!”

“Devicer who?” Nadal asked calmly, cocking his head slightly without so much as flinching.

“Cut the act! Major Mizuki’s been missing for over six damn months, but I saw him! I saw him with my own eyes! He saved my life!”

“Interesting. We’ll have to proceed with an investigation.”

Yu realized something as he listened. The aggravated young officer’s voice was familiar. And then he remembered the patrol boat from the night he had escaped the portal-keep. There had been a man who seemed to have known the last Devicer Three, and he had called out to Yu as he left. Yu remembered his voice.

It was this man.

Yu’s heart skipped a beat, but luckily, the officer appeared uninterested in the middle schooler laying on the MRI bed.

“I recall some of the new refugees gossiping about the same thing,” Nadal mused. “If even you, Captain Sakuma, claim to have sighted him, then there can be no mistake. Yes, I will contact you as soon as I learn something!”

All the while, Devicer Three simply lay there, and Nadal hardly even blinked.

3

“You can’t armorize?!”

“They pulled the Mark III’s particles out of me,” Yu clarified to Ijuin. “It took almost an hour.”

The bed of the kei truck jostled and swayed uncomfortably, even at the slow speed they were going, and the wind whipped by their ears, though not enough to obstruct conversation entirely. Once Yu’s examination was finished, they had borrowed an electric vehicle to take out into the town.

Natsuki sat at the wheel, with Aliya beside her.

“It’s not so bad in the tower,” Natsuki said. “I wouldn’t exactly say ‘no’ to a nice apartment up there.”

“Us ordinary people would get sick of how quiet it is before long, though,” said the younger girl.

“Well, there’s plenty of fun outside, I bet.”

“Nothing’s more unbearable to humans than boredom, after all.”

The central block of Nayuta was a pure world. Sanitary. Ponds dotted the landscape and irrigation canals wound like streams through the trees of the block’s forest section. Small birds chirped from the branches while brooks bubbled beneath.

It was the perfect place for a nature stroll, but nature was the last thing on the teenagers’ minds after the collapse of modern society. What they wanted was that long-lost bustle and energy of a busy city.

“I sympathize,” Ein said, speaking loudly over the truck bed’s racket. Otherwise, though, the bumping seemed to bother her very little. “I respect the sages’ ways and customs, but living with them?” She gave a profound and knowing look. “That’s something entirely different.”

It was a clear spring day and just about lunchtime. Which was exactly what had brought the group to the edge of the outer block.

Natsuki parked the car in a lot near the ocean, and at last the swaying ceased. The “lot” was half-filled and really more of a thin layer of gravel than anything else. A short walk away was an open plaza filled with vendors and stands sheltered by sheets of cloth, like a humble little food market or a foreign bazaar.

“What sounds good for lunch?” Natsuki asked cheerfully as she let her nose guide her across the food at nearly every stand they passed. “They’ve got all sorts of stuff!”

“Easy. Meat!” Ijuin answered at once. “Guys, they’ve got roasted chicken thighs over there! Look at how crisp that skin looks.” He glanced down. “What the...?! Look at that price!”

“Yeesh, fifty-two hundred yen for one leg,” Yu read off of the sign, wincing.

The cost of living here was evidently just as steep as it had been at the refugee town on the Great Kansai Bay’s coast.

Natsuki, well-accustomed to such price gouging, pointed a ways down and said, “It’s only a thousand for one skewer down that way.”

“Wait, Natsuki. It says ‘poultry.’ You can’t assume they mean specifically chicken,” Aliya interjected. She narrowed her eyes. “That’s definitely shady. It could be anything.”

The ever-dauntless Replicant girl stepped forward. “Then let us clarify. Excuse me, shopkeep!” she called out. “I have a question for you. What manner of fowl does the ‘poultry’ on your sign refer to?” The man answered. “Gull, you say? Is it good?”

It took the man a moment to recover from being entranced by Ein’s attractiveness and the sight of her pointed ears. “Nope, but most folk don’t care so long as it’s meat,” he replied spiritedly. “And it’s a whole lot easier to get my hands on than any land bird.”

“I see. So it’s a seafowl,” Ein surmised.

“Y’know, we don’t get many of you elf scientists down here often.”

“Oh, no, I’m no sage,” she corrected the man. “I imagine you’ll be seeing more of me in the future, so I’m glad we could have this meeting.”

“That so, eh?”

The way Ein was conducting herself was certainly becoming of the clone of an elvish queen, Yu thought to himself. Refined and cordial, yet candid and sociable. She seemed to be reveling in the conversation, in the experience of crossing racial borders, and it evoked the stereotypical image of a naive noblewoman. Ironically, though, it occurred to Yu that nobles probably interacted with more people than most.

Add to her affability an unfaltering confidence and a fearlessly outgoing nature, and you had Ein at the most fundamental level.

“Something tells me Ein’s a lot better with people than me,” Yu muttered.

“Well,” said Ein, “what’s our verdict? Based on my own hunting experiences, seafowl is not particularly appetizing, especially when there are available alternatives. Although, there is something to be said for being adventurous in youth.”

“You’re not inspiring a lot of confidence in me,” Aliya said.

The others weren’t all that convinced either. And so they found themselves drifting towards the inviting scent of charcoal and burning fish, with Ijuin looking askance at the mystery meat and lamenting what could have been.

The vendor they ultimately ordered lunch from was selling a variety of fatty, in-season seafood, from mackerel to smelt-whitings to hairtails to even tiger shrimp. The fish were filleted and skewered, while the shrimp were similarly served on a stick but in sets of three, and at a higher price tag.

“At least it’s cheaper than the other meat,” Yu said.

“Ah, supply and demand,” said Ijuin. “It’s a good thing I like shrimp, but man, I’m seriously gonna start dyin’ for some nice, juicy beef or pork here pretty soon.”

“Look at those posters,” Aliya pointed out to the dynamic duo. “‘We accept won and renminbi.’ They’re all over the place. Honestly, those currencies are probably worth a lot more than the yen at this point.”

“Makes sense,” Natsuki commented. “Korea and China can still pass as actual governments.”

They meandered through the market, bags of food in hand.

“Hey!” Ijuin said. “Tables and chairs over there!”

He jogged over. Aliya and Natsuki followed behind.

“It looks like everyone else has the same idea,” said Aliya. “With all these people eating outside, it really does feel like a foreign night market or something.”

“Bit hard to go brick and mortar these days,” Natsuki added.

They found an empty table and laid out their spoils. Yu promptly stuffed his face with some of the grilled fish, followed by one of the salted rice balls they had found at a separate stall. It went without saying, of course, that a city surrounded by water boasted exceptional seafood. That is to say, it was delicious.

“Yu, this stretchy snack amuses me,” Ein remarked.

“I’d call mochi more of a meal than a snack, personally,” Yu replied.

Ein alone had chosen the sweeter, squishier of the two rice options, childishly stretching the rice cake out with her chopsticks between bites. Despite her blatantly poor manners, though, when it was Ein doing it, she did it with the grace of a highborn lady engaging in a bit of quaint fun.

Yu watched closely, wondering how one could possibly be so beautiful while doing something as mundane as eating, and his heart began to beat faster. This was the girl—the remarkable girl who had decided to make him the target of her advances. For some inscrutable reason.

But rather than pondering the unknowable, Yu redirected himself to more pressing issues.

“So by the way, guys,” he said. “We never really needed money back at the base, but we’ll probably run out before long now that we’re in an actual town.”

“Oh,” Ijuin said. “Huh. You’re right.”

“We’ll have to find jobs,” Aliya murmured. “I’d really rather not live with Uncle Nadal.”

“I can already see him putting his employees in cosplay,” Ijuin said forebodingly.

“I knew that’s what it was,” Yu muttered.

Youths looking for work and fretting over making a living was by no means uncommon—for developing countries, that is. There were probably minors just like them, worrying about the exact same thing, all over Japan in its current state.

But the oldest of the group had thrived in this situation, and she flashed a big grin. “Hell yeah, sounds to me like we gotta break into the industry! I was just thinking me and some friends from back at the refugee town needed to team up and put something together.”

“Oh, nice, Natsuki! Whadda you think, Ichinose?” Ijuin asked.

Yu blinked. “Me? Why would I be against it?”

“Bro, you’re...” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “You’re the new Devicer Three.” And then he spoke normally again. “Won’t the military and the elves be on you nonstop from now on?”

They couldn’t know who might be listening. A single mention of that one name could have been dangerous.

Yu saw the worry on his friend’s face and fumbled with his words. “I-I don’t know,” he muttered. “I don’t even have it on me right now, and I already told them they could keep it.”

He was it. He was the successor.

Hearing it put so plainly made Yu remember his foes: the archmage Quldald, a hero larger than life—and Scullchance of the Pride, a girl who appeared as delicate and deceptively beautiful as she was ferocious.

To be Devicer Three was to fight for others, amid the cheers of allies. To fight amid cheers and applause. But the face underneath—Yu—was no match for the archmages and he knew it.

But if only that were the most of his worries.

Their featureless faces emerged in his mind. The refugees. The sailors from the patrol ship. Strangers, all of them. And a silent whisper of a thought burgeoned, more in his heart than on his lips.

“Can I...really fight for these people?”

After lunch, it was finally time to relax. A small walk away from the food market was a busy street lined with improvised houses made of wood and scrap iron. It was full of energy, and people came and went from the buildings in great numbers. From restaurants to shops with all manner of inventory, the place was a veritable little business quarter.

“Everywhere’s gotta have cute girls,” Natsuki commented on the nature of some of the businesses. “Guess this is where they’re at.”

“And I bet their bosses call them ‘waitresses,’” Aliya said. “Yeah, I’m sure they’re so busy serving food all day. That’s totally all they do. Ugh, all men are the same.”

“Oh, I saw some places where they’re definitely not waitresses.”

“J-Just for the record,” Ijuin stammered, “that doesn’t apply to us. We’re innocent middle schoolers.”

“I won’t speak for you, Ijuin,” said Ein, “but I certainly can for Yu. He has no need for such diversions when his fated partner is already ready and willing.”

“Ready and willing for what?!” Yu cried. He hastily decided to change the subject before his cheeks could go any redder and pointed at a sign. “Anyway, look! There’s a karaoke place over there.”

“Huh?” Ijuin looked down the road. “Karaoke? How?”

There stood a small but cozy bar, already bustling with drinkers in the middle of the afternoon. Among them were both men and women mingling, old and young alike. They could almost make out the vague melody of a song behind the tone-deaf singing. A peek inside revealed that the instrumental music was drifting from a speaker.

“Huh,” Natsuki said in amusement. “Back at my place, we played our own music on guitars and harmonicas. This place is high tech.”

“How are they getting any song files to play without internet?” Ijuin wondered, bemused.

After everything fell apart, the phrase “look it up” lost its meaning. When the government sparked the Evacuation by telling its citizens to flee, much of Honshu was already underwater, and the rest of the world’s northern hemisphere hadn’t been any better off. All servers and lines in the capital were destroyed, and now the digital world was as barren as the real one. Even if you somehow managed to have internet access, possibly via satellite, there wasn’t much to see anymore.

And yet they could hear the music flowing through the bar’s speaker. Ijuin was perplexed.

“Maybe it’s some instrumental they downloaded before the Evacuation?” he supposed.

“I don’t think so. It sounds like it was made for karaoke specifically.” Aliya’s long ears perked up with a gentle twitch as she listened. It used to be one of the top pop songs. “If I had to guess, I’d say someone remade it from scratch using MIDI. Who knows where they found the song itself, but people with perfect pitch, like me, could definitely recompose a track by ear.”

“Interesting,” Ein said. “There are bound to be skilled tradesmen among so many people. All it takes, then, is a little profiteering spirit, and innovation is born.”

As the princess so grandiosely put it, despite the year of struggle and setback after the collapse of urban life in Japan, the city of Nayuta was flourishing in its own way. There were libraries stocked with manga, novels, and even e-books downloaded onto tablets and smartphones, all scavenged from the mainland. Small theaters were a popular distraction and could screen movies on DVD or Blu-ray. People could sell their knickknacks or other handmade goods at flea markets, including home-brewed liquor that would have been extremely illegal in a normal world.

It wasn’t perfect. But knowledge, creativity, and will had come together to create a rather impressive community. And as a matter of fact, one such product of human ingenuity was calling their names.

“Hey, a bathhouse,” Yu pointed out.

“Did I hear ‘bath’?” Ein said. “Let’s go, Yu! It calls to me!”

All of a sudden, their next destination was decided.

4

The sound of splashing water was a comforting and welcome change of ambience. The three girls submerged themselves in the warmth, and they collectively let the tension drain from their bodies, pure bliss showing in their relaxed expressions.

“It is easy to neglect the luxury of a nice bath when life is lived traveling from one place to the next,” Ein expounded. “A day without a bath is not a day complete!”

“The shower last night was enough to convince me,” Aliya concurred.

“All this room makes it even better!” Natsuki added.

The women’s bath was spacious yet still generously filled, and the wooden, midcentury modern style evoked a cozy and homely sort of nostalgic atmosphere. Water flowed freely from a faucet with the simple turn of a knob.

The luxuries Nayuta afforded thanks to its self-sufficiency were hard to resist, and the bath was exceptionally busy that afternoon. Women’s chattering and gossiping voices echoed throughout the room. Ein’s, Aliya’s, and Natsuki’s, of course, were among them.

“A floating city definitely has enough water,” Natsuki remarked. “The worst part about it’s just that power curfew thing, but that’s really it. You can use computers, appliances, pretty much anything as much as you want during the day.” She sighed blissfully. “For real, this is heaven compared to my old place. Keeping the water treatment system going was a pain and a half, and whatever water we got out of it we had to ration!”

“Have you always been camped in that refugee town?” Aliya asked.

“Nah,” Natsuki replied placidly. “Wandered around a bit first. Went wherever my legs took me.”

She grinned indifferently, before sinking deeper into the water. She was attractive and exceedingly self-aware of that fact. Her curves were curvy, but her abs were pronounced and her waist tight. In short, she was a knockout who could literally knock you right out if she wanted to.

“Doesn’t this make you just wanna knock back a cold one?” she said.

“I’m assuming you don’t mean a cold glass of water,” said Aliya.

Natsuki cackled. “Come on, now, don’t make it sound so bad. I was in high school! A few beers and a bottle of sake or shochu never hurt nobody.”

“You were in high school!”

Compared to the curvaceous samurai girl, Aliya was very petite, and it wasn’t quite that she was just short or skinny. Her very stature and build was delicate in nature. However, she was still a woman and had the distinct features of one. All in all, though, she seemed fragile enough to break if you handled her wrong, like a small piece of candy.

“Let me say this now before it’s too late—keep your alcoholic beverages away from me,” Ein stated.

“But whyyy?” Natsuki whined. “How else are we gonna bond and become BFFs?”

“You speak of the devil’s water!” Ein cried. “A single sip of it is enough to turn wise men into shameless fools!” Out of them all, Ein was the most radiant. Thin in the waist but full in the bust and hips. There was not a single woman in the room who wouldn’t have been jealous of her perfect hourglass figure. It was almost unfair. “I’d much rather spend time with Yu than in debauchery.”

“You know, it doesn’t seem like you two have taken things very far,” Natsuki said. “Still in the hand-holding phase, huh?”

“I don’t judge him for his boundaries.”

“He’s definitely that type,” said Aliya. “He’s never had a girlfriend, and he isn’t the kind of guy who’d start a relationship just for fun. He takes everything seriously.”

“He sure does,” Natsuki laughed.

“But he’s also pretty skittish. I bet if I jumped in, I could steal him right out from under you,” Aliya teased.

“I will thank you not to complicate our healthily progressing relationship,” Ein decreed. “All it takes is a single night alone for the tide to change, daughter of Chloe. Talk to me when you’re prepared for what that means.”

“Wait, how much of this is a joke?!” Aliya exclaimed.

The bathhouse was boisterous, but not so loud that one couldn’t make out what the three rambunctious girls were chatting about. Not even the wall separating them from the men’s section was enough to muffle their voices. As it turned out, true to the place’s retro Japan aesthetic, the wall didn’t actually reach all the way to the ceiling.

Yu and Ijuin could hear their every word from the other side.

“So what’s your game plan, bud?”

“Plan? What’s my plan?!” Yu blustered. “What would your plan be?!”

“Well, considering I’m engaged, I’d have to turn her down,” Ijuin replied. “But to be fair, my parents are the ones who arranged it.”

“Oh, really?” The gears in Yu’s head creaked. “Wait. Okay, hold up. What did you just say? Engaged?!”

“Have I never mentioned it before? There was this family in my neighborhood in Yokohama who my folks had been close with for a long time, some stuff happened, and then they promised their daughter to the Ijuins’ firstborn. Which is, y’know, me.”

“I always knew you sort of grew up well-off, but that’s a whole other level.” Yu had always had a hunch as to Ijuin’s affluent upbringing, but he tried to be polite and had never asked about it outright. Suddenly, all that talk of vacation homes in Hayama, overseas family trips, and Sunday classical music concerts with his mother made a lot more sense. “So are you like, old money?”

“C’mon, like any of that matters anymore, am I right?”

Ijuin talked around it, but he didn’t deny it. Yu sighed. Some best friend he was. It had only taken him a year to learn something so basic about Ijuin’s personal life.

Ijuin’s lighthearted smile darkened. “Both my and my fiancée’s families evacuated to Fukuoka. Man, I wish I could make sure they’re safe! No internet, no emergency broadcasts. It’s drivin’ me crazy! Y’know?”

Yu was struck by his friend’s plea. His desperation. So heavily that he almost said something.

Why don’t I fly over and check?

Nayuta was on the opposite side of Shikoku, but with the Mark III, the leap to northern Kyushu was like walking across the street. Yu would have made the offer, had he not heard something first.

Some men were gossiping as they washed off their bodies.

“Did you hear someone spotted Devicer Three?” one of them said excitedly.

“I thought he was dead!”

“I bet he was just wounded and now he’s back in shape! Thank god, right? Not having to worry about Anomalies is a real load off our backs.”

“Maybe we’ve got a chance after all.”

The men talked with voices and faces full of hope. They were smiling. It wasn’t often they got to do that.

But Yu wasn’t.

He swallowed his words, and Ijuin peeked at the young Devicer with worry.

5

Yu wandered aimlessly through the business quarter. Alone. A short while ago, he and his friends had just gotten out of the bath and were discussing where they should eat dinner, but Yu had slipped away in the middle of it. Without so much as telling anyone.

He had no destination. His heart was in a blender and his head felt like it was going to burst. The voices played in his brain on endless repeat.

“Did you hear someone spotted Devicer Three?”

“Three! Number Three! You’re alive!”

The cheers of the hopeful.

“Semantics. It’s not that you can ‘use’ it. You can harness it.”

The expectations of Nadal.

“Well met, Vajra One, and welcome to my radiant abode. I am Scullchance of the Pride!”

“I must see that beauteous armor once more.”

The words of his enemies.

“What’s wrong with me...?”

Anxiety seized Yu’s stomach. But why? What was there to be stressed about? Hadn’t he successfully protected his friends? Hadn’t they made it to Nayuta? The worst that had happened was the...armorization incident.

Yu fought against the urge to retch. He felt heavy. Every step seemed like an impossible challenge.

He could use the Asura Frame. Harness it, even. Fight. Win. Protect. Kill.

Kill.

He could slaughter the Anomalies. He could bring the archmages to their knees.

Walking suddenly became too much. He squatted down on the side of the road to try and wait for strength to come back to his legs.

“Are you okay, Yu?”

He turned around and saw her. “Ein?” The Replicant girl. “How long have you been following me?”

“Since you left,” she said gently. “I didn’t want to disturb you if you wanted to be alone, but you looked unwell. I couldn’t leave you.”

She helped him up and led him to an alley where they could sit down. Yu leaned back against the thin wall of a shack and let out a deep sigh.

He turned to his partner as she sat next to him. “Thanks. I feel a little better.”

“I hardly need gratitude to be by your side. However, if you must thank me, I’ll accept your undying love as repayment.”

“Wh-Who said I was in love with you yet?”

“‘Yet’ indeed. It’s only a matter of time.” She flashed a coquettish grin. “The sooner you give up and let it happen, the better.”

Once the beating in his chest had subsided, Yu realized how much calmer he was. She was trying to cheer him up. And it was working.

“Sometimes being alone only makes the shadows seem greater than they are,” she said.

“Seems that way. I’ll remember that.”

It had been almost half a month since Yu’s first armorization. A lot of time for unseen stress to slowly build, and this was what happened when he let it reach the tipping point. Yu decided he wasn’t a fan of panic attacks.

“Do you dislike donning the Asura?” Ein asked.

“Of course not,” Yu replied. “It lets me protect everyone.”

That word—everyone—made him realize something. He wasn’t lying to himself. He did want to help people. That pretense was what made the fighting bearable. The problem was just...

“It looks like they’re having fun over there,” said Ein.

“You’re right. That’s a lot of people. And they’ve got something gated off.”

They could hear the excited hollers from where they sat. A short distance away from the alley was a rectangular field enclosed by an iron mesh and surrounded by a crowd of people. They were cheering, shouting, and raising their fists in the air with fevered passion.

Yu picked himself up, approached, and his jaw dropped.

“They’re playing soccer!”

“Ah, the sport you told me about.”

Inside the makeshift fence was a half-sized pitch carpeted with artificial turf. Each team was only seven players each, four short of the standard, and the game seemed to only be timed for a single ten-minute period. Men and women alike composed the teams, and people of all ages were participating; the oldest of them appeared upwards of forty. One group of players wore red vests over their clothes, while the other wore matching blue T-shirts.

They played hard, and when the game was over, the next two teams took the field and a new match began. Yu recognized this style of play.

“It’s like how they do it in street basketball,” he said. “It’s just a bunch of friends. The losing team drops out, and the other team plays the winners of the next match.”

It was a far cry from an official match played by professionals, that was for sure, but a lot of them clearly knew their way around a ball. They were fast, dexterous, and a few seemed to manipulate the soccer ball with the skill of a veteran player. Some of the plays they pulled off made the crowd go wild.

Outside the court, many of the spectators appeared to be exchanging money every time the teams switched. There was clearly gambling going on.

“So this is how they do it.” Yu realized what it all was. “There’s no TV anymore, so this is how the sports fans get their fix. People can watch, make bets, and the others get to have fun playing.”

“They look very passionate. Oh?” Ein pointed towards the field. The match was paused. One of the players had taken a nasty hit to the ankle, and he wasn’t getting back up again any time soon. It looked like they would have to forfeit. One of his teammates was shouting something to the spectators. “It seems they need a replacement. What a coincidence.”

“What? How so?”

Five minutes later...

Yu had replaced his glasses for sports goggles and donned a black vest over his shirt. He stood on the pitch with his teammates. Ein had found him a spot on the team rather easily—and one-sidedly, Yu thought.

The opposing team was in blue, and they were all visibly built men. Yu had already deduced that they weren’t strangers to the soccer field.

A teammate passed the ball to Yu, who caught it with the inside of his foot before firmly stepping on it. All without needing to look down. He scanned the field and noted the positions of every player. An instant was all he needed. There were six total plus one goalkeeper on each team.

One of the blue-uniformed men made a mad dash straight for Yu, coming for the ball like a rabid animal. But by then Yu had already kicked it into the air, and it was flying towards one of his teammates on the far side of the field, straight between the defenders. The through ball reached its target successfully.

Yu lingered on the sensation for a moment. The feeling of that ball at his feet. He hadn’t experienced it in months, but it was all coming back to him faster than expected. Even as he dwelt on such nameless emotions, though, Yu never took his eyes off the ball.

The flustered teammate shot for the goal. Miss.

The opponent took the offense, but with a single sloppy pass, Yu intercepted the ball and flipped the tables again. He passed it to the person nearest him, expecting a one-two, but he never received the return pass. Yu just couldn’t find a rhythm with his team. Slowly, however, they seemed to realize that he knew what he was doing and began to trust him with the ball more. But the same went for the opposing team, and their defense tightened up.

Yu skillfully dribbled past the man in his way, only to find an even bigger man coming for him next. Already anticipating this, he turned around and let him collide with his back. Yu was small, even for an average middle schooler, so he was well accustomed to being outsized. Securing the enemy as best he could with his body weight, he passed the ball.

But the ball was stolen before his teammate could get control of it, and suddenly their goal was in danger—or it would have been if not for the excellent save by the young man playing as goalie. He kicked it back towards Yu.

“All yours, little man!”

Yu caught it beneath his foot beautifully. The keeper was good. Really good. He must have played in school or had been on a youth team like Yu.

The opponents’ defense looked by the books. In that case, if they could keep the ball in as many places as possible, then they might just have a shot at the goal.

Yu never stopped moving. Careful to keep an eye on the defense, he focused on being open to passes, though there never was anyone with the omnipotence to know exactly when to send the ball back to him. As was to be expected from a casual game of street soccer, most people simply wanted to make a beeline for the goal and score some points.

Occasionally, when the ball did find its way to Yu, it only stayed there for half a second. He passed it left, right, backward, forward, barely dribbling it once or twice before kicking it off somewhere new. It was a simple and safe strategy, but a slow one. The clock was running out.

With seconds left, the ball came back to Yu. He dribbled it forward, cutting his way through the enemy’s defense, prying his way in, and then, with a pitch of his leg, he launched it straight towards the goal.

The goalkeeper couldn’t react in time, taken by surprise at the sudden and aggressive play. The ball flew through the lower left corner and slammed into the net.

“I don’t know much about this ‘soccer,’ but I could tell that you were incredible!” Ein cheered. “You did amazing, Yu!”

He blushed. “That was...just luck.”

That last goal had been the game point. They had won, one-to-nothing. The next game was already underway.

The Replicant girl scoffed and smiled. “Don’t be so modest, Yu. I can tell when you’re lying.”

“Wait, really?!”

“You display the same keen discernment during combat. No movement of yours is without purpose. I know it. In fact, I’ll wager a guess as to your entire thought process—you lacked for comrades of your skill, and thus the ability to coordinate. So, you manipulated the sphere throughout as much of the field as possible to lessen the probability of mistakes while you waited for your chance to score the victory point.”

Yu had not a single retort. Ein had called herself a “warrior queen” at one point, and clearly she lived up to the title. Perhaps that was how she had seen through him so utterly, despite not knowing the first thing about the sport. There was probably only one other player who had noticed his strategy.

“You’ve worked up quite the sweat,” she said. “I’ll fetch some water.”

“Oh, yeah. Thanks. Hey.” Yu called out to her before she could leave. “Let’s play together next time.”

Ein smiled, and said, “I like that idea. It sounds fun!”

With that, she walked off. Leaving Yu to ruminate on the weight of what he had just done in private.

He had just asked a girl out.

He couldn’t believe it. He had done it almost reflexively. That girl was just so magnetic, and somehow, no matter what they did together, Yu felt that he would enjoy it by the simple virtue of her company.

“You’re not bad, kid,” a voice called out to him.

It was the goalie from his team. He looked to be somewhere in his twenties, and his black hair was cut short—a stereotypical sports guy. And, more than likely, he was the only player on the field who had caught on to Yu’s plan.

He had made sure Yu always got the ball when he caught the opponents’ goal attempts, and what’s more, he’d told the team to keep wide around the end. Just to go along with Yu’s tactic.

“We gotta play again sometime,” he said. “Name’s Sakuma. These are kinda my stomping grounds.”

“Thanks,” Yu replied shyly. “I’m Ichinose.” Sakuma shook his outstretched hand. He was happy to hear the praise of an older athlete like him. But he couldn’t shake the odd sense of déjà vu. “Where did you learn to play?”

“The soccer club back in my school days. And then I kept at it after joining the Force.”

Yu’s breath caught in his throat. He had asked the question expecting to hear that Sakuma had been a pro or something. But now he remembered. Last night. The officer he had rescued on the patrol ship. And then that morning, the very same officer had barged into the MRI room demanding to know Devicer Three’s whereabouts. Yu hadn’t recognized him out of uniform.

“Oh, Ichinose. One other thing. I might be overstepping my bounds here, but hear me out,” Sakuma said. “Kids like you shouldn’t be hanging around those elves. There’s talk going around that the migrants are actually spies. They could be feeding info to the Anomalies as we speak, so watch your back.”

Sakuma was deadly serious. He shot Ein an unpleasant glance as she returned, and yet, Yu sensed no malice. Only innocent concern for a child’s safety.