Chapter 4: The King’s Return

1

It was cloudy that late April afternoon. Aliya Todo was at work, either aiding or babysitting her eccentric uncle, depending on your perspective. Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, this was an easy task when the speaker was busy fiddling with his toys. In truth, he wasn’t lying when he said he did it to meditate; when his fingers were preoccupied, you could be certain that his brain was at work.

The problem, then, was when his fingers weren’t preoccupied. In such cases, Nadal’s silent scheming manifested itself much more vocally, in the form of snark, sarcasm, and every other technique in his arsenal of being a public nuisance. Should there be no one within earshot of his ramblings, he would go out of his way to rectify that by ensnaring some poor soul, regardless of the importance of whatever their task at the time might have been.

Thus, Aliya’s mission was simple: keep her uncle on a leash. And for the times when he didn’t know when to shut up, she had a secret weapon.

“Indeed, compared to we elves, you humans are rather simple, neurologically speaking, and your people have the emotional intelligence of wild animals,” Nadal ranted. “Rest assured, however, that I say that with no prejudiced intent. I’m actually something of a zoology buff... Just a bit of black humor for you.” There was silence. “You were supposed to laugh. Why are you smiling like that? Are you patronizing me?”

“Don’t make me call Ein,” Aliya said.

That secret weapon never failed. Reluctantly, Nadal finally stopped accosting the innocent cleaning staff. The Replicant girl evidently held great sway over the fastidious speaker.

Aliya giggled with cruel satisfaction. “I’m very glad that little birdie told me how often you got raked over the coals when you were the queen’s counselor.”

Nadal’s hard expression looked a little paler than usual. “We have no business bothering Her Highness with these trivial matters.”

“I dunno,” she said menacingly, “Ein told me to let her know whenever you got on my nerves. She seemed pretty serious to me.”

Nadal went quiet. Pleased with her victory in their battle of words, Aliya turned back around and regarded the items on display closely. Several incredibly valuable-looking objects were locked inside glass cases, like what one might find at a museum. The place had a long name, so most elves simply referred to it as the Treasury, but Aliya remembered it was actually called the Other World Archive for Culturally Significant Artifacts.

There was an ominous pot, a staff, a cape, a mysteriously glowing black agate, a bracelet engraved with magic runes, an aged scroll, a stone pagoda carved with a long inscription, the skull of what looked to be some kind of mammal... Numerous items of unknown origin were set out, and supposedly they had all been brought over from Param by the migrant elves.

“Nothing here really strikes me as ‘treasure,’” Aliya admitted. “But they make my head feel...tingly. Maybe it’s the nanomachines.”

She looked down at the ring of light glowing from her right palm. It had been active ever since they first set foot in the Treasury.

Nadal shot his niece an aloof and sidelong glance, then puffed his chest. “As suspected,” he said. “These former magic items all lost their powers when they were brought to Earth, but the spiritual energies they’ve imbibed over the ages are not so easily diminished.”

“What’s ‘as suspected’?” Aliya asked.

“Oh, just a theory I had. Your nano-abilities are manifested in your perception, and you can already detect magic, so I thought I’d give them a little extra nudge. See if you would react to the energy of the items here.”

“I don’t remember signing any consent form for this experiment!”

“Try to understand. These times are dire, and you and your friends’ abilities very well may be our last hope. I brought you here to that end.”

“You know I’m your niece, not a tool, right?” Aliya huffed. Shame on her for expecting anything different out of her uncle. “And here I thought you were spending all this time with me because you managed to find some semblance of familial love in that thick head of yours!”

“I’m simply being logical. Wait, you’re seeing Her Highness later. Redact that statement.” Nadal forced his face into a different expression. “Oh, but I do love you, my dear niece!” he said unconvincingly. “There. Tell her that’s what I said. She should like that.”

“Oh, sure, I’ll tell her that. Along with everything else!” Aliya stomped away from her uncle and his oh-so-genuine affection, though not out of any real anger. She had made peace with the man he was a long time ago. Something had caught her eye.

She approached an elongated display case, inside of which lay a weapon. At the end of its long shaft was a vicious blade that was curved like a katana and far too big to fit a normal naginata.

“This looks like something straight out of Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” Aliya murmured. The point where the hilt and blade connected had been crafted into the shape of a dragon, with the blade extending from its open mouth. A name popped into her head—Green Dragon Crescent Blade.

On the opposite end, at the ferrule where the shaft would meet the ground, there was an oddly shaped bit of construction.

“A wheel? Why would there be a...”

Aliya stared at the Green Dragon, at the implement at the bottom of its shaft. Suddenly, her head started to tingle.

“We should get back to the office, Aliya.”

“Oh,” she said. “Right.”

She followed behind Nadal, but she couldn’t shake that uncanny feeling. It was like the answer was right there on the fringes of her mind. Aliya realized that she could have solved the problem by simply asking for Nadal’s help—for all his quirks, he was quite knowledgeable—but she’d also just as soon have flung herself off the floor of Central Tower they were on. That being the ninth.

Just like a regular museum, the floor opened up to a reception desk, with the elevator and stairs just a short walk away. But Nadal headed for neither.

“See? I told you,” he said, stopping suddenly. “I was right to bring you here.”

The entrance was blocked by a squad of men holding guns, and they were aimed at Nadal. They wore blue and green camouflage, Defense Force uniforms. Their timing couldn’t have been worse.

Outside the window, Aliya saw an amber curtain covering the sky. A portal-keep had materialized. The crystal palace had become visible from the city only recently, and now it was finally here.

Aliya pointed outside. “L-Look! Can’t you see that?!” she shouted. “They’re here! And it’s going to be more than just a skirmish!”

“Then it’s a good thing we got here in time,” a young officer replied coldly. “Once we rescue Devicer Three from you people, they won’t be a problem.”

The man was tall and lean, and his black hair was buzzed short like a proper sportsman. A captain’s badge adorned the collar of his uniform.

“Other-worlders, we are officially taking control. Once you’ve surrendered, we ask for your cooperation in maintaining basic infrastructure around the settlement, and we promise to treat you fairly. So long as you don’t try to call your friends for help.”

There were two groups in the observation lounge, but neither were enjoying the view from Central Tower’s top floor. One consisted of about twenty elves. Every speaker had been taken hostage, a task made easy by the fact that the sages were unarmed by tradition.

The other had the guns. A suicide squad of thirty-five, armed with Type 89s, some of which were trained on the elves who had been rounded up and sat down near one of the glass walls.

“Call who, might I ask?” a speaker said, unafraid of the weapon in his face. “What nation or military have we that comes to our aid?”

“You tell me,” the squad’s leader replied. “There are two portals in western Japan. One in Maizuru, one in the Great Kansai Bay, and both have been on the move around all of Kansai.” His eyes turned sharp like daggers. “Who’s to say they’re not getting a little inside information?”

“As if this bears repeating, but I’ll say it once more. Your claims are groundless,” Raghu El Lapan shot back calmly.

Even for an elf, he was astonishing. An aura of grace permeated his being that marked him among his peers, and it was only accentuated by his flowing, ash blond hair that extended all the way down to his waist. He was something of the council’s spokesperson, and it wasn’t hard to see why the folks in the outer block had nicknamed him “Prince Charming.”

He elegantly displayed his indignation with a brush of his hair behind his ear. An act so utterly sophisticated that such regality simply couldn’t have originated from this planet. It made Sakuma scowl.

Raghu regarded the ruffled captain for a moment. “Consider the following,” he said. “The phantom fortresses and the Chosen Dharva are just as much our enemy as yours, and they have killed our kind as they have your own. We are on the same side.”

“Then where the hell is Devicer Three?!” Sakuma screamed in a sudden burst of rage. “He’s here one moment, and then he’s gone. There’s only one explanation. You’re in league with the archmages, you’re keeping him prisoner, and you’re going to turn him over to the enemy!”

Sakuma was a fearless man, but not an angry man. He always spoke for the military with a level head, and his temper rarely flared, if ever. But he could only take so much. He could only spin his wheels for so many months, running around in an endless maze with no exit like a lab rat searching for cheese that doesn’t exist, before something became the final straw.

Aliya could imagine the stress he must have been under. He wasn’t like her uncle. He couldn’t twiddle his thumbs with a calculated smile while the world burned, like Nadal could. That just wasn’t human.

About half an hour had passed since they’d been taken hostage. The amber aurora was ever-present, and it was only a matter of time before they were attacked.

“Hey,” Aliya whispered to her uncle, “do you think someone fed them all that? About how you apparently plan to sell Devicer Three off to the archmages.”

“I do. An ex-Defense Force agent of mine,” he whispered back. “Well, he didn’t know he was an agent, to be fair. I just told him a few things that might have influenced him into spreading a little information to Sakuma and his comrades.”

“Why can’t you be as eloquent at normal conversation as you are at being a snake?!” Then again, it was his incessant plotting that had landed them in this situation, and the young half-elf wasn’t very comfortable with loaded guns being pointed at her. “Not that I’d call this eloquent. Do you see what you’ve gotten us into?!”

“Drastic times call for drastic measures,” Nadal murmured flatly.

“How does that correlate to this?!” Aliya demanded.

“Not even the great and mighty lion can fight when plagued by parasites. I simply thought it was time to be rid of ours.”

Aliya blinked in surprise. Nadal wasn’t joking like he usually would. He was calm. Calculating. She had forgotten that he, as well as her mother, had come from a world of endemic war and strife. To Nadal, this was yet another battlefield.

Word was that the insurgents had first targeted the Prayer Wheel behind the tower, their source of electricity. Every functioning combat vehicle had charged through the central block’s surveillance network straight for the Ferris wheel-esque generator, and while the security droids were deployed in defense, this had been a feint. The coup’s real goal was the council, and the ensuing chaos had been the perfect smokescreen for the bulk of the force to invade the tower directly.

“B-But what if they kill us?” Aliya stammered quietly.

“They won’t,” Nadal replied assuredly. “We’re sages. Each a genius in our own right, by Earth standards. They know how valuable we are, and that they need us to maintain the settlement’s systems.”

“Well, I’m not a sage!” Aliya decided she liked keeping her fate in her own hands, and that she wasn’t going to sit around and do nothing. She remembered her uncle asking her to use her nanomachines earlier, specifically to send a commlink (which came very much in handy at times like this). She could contact her friends. “Ijuin! Natsuki!”

While Aliya was working stealthily to distract herself from the fear, Nadal glanced to the side in mild shock.

“Well,” he murmured, “this was not as suspected. I had hoped he would make an appearance, but wasn’t counting on it.”

He followed High Priestess Azalin’s gaze. As both an Asura Frame development lead and devout servant to the artificial gods of destruction, as well as a speaker on the council, she too had been taken hostage. This whole time she had been eyeing the barrel aimed at her with worry, but now, she was smiling, hope in her eyes as she stared up into the air. Her watch—the portable computer on her wrist—had booted up on its own, and it projected a three-dimensional hologram of none other than the Mark III, along with various data parameters.

And Rudra’s power output was skyrocketing. Yu had armorized. Against all odds and despite a success rate of barely thirty percent, he had done it.

Azalin rejoiced at the awakening of their Asura of the sky, her smile pleasant and charming. “Well, someone’s feeling better!”

2

Everyone in Nayuta was within commlink range of each other, making any augmented individual within the city capable of sending and receiving messages composed not of voice or text, but thoughts. Which meant that Aliya had no difficulty sending an SOS, even at gunpoint.

“It’s Aliya! The military’s taken us prisoner!”

She need do nothing else but make that single silent plea. Yu was at the harbor when he got the transmission, right about when the amber aurora appeared. The militia was gathering at the shore and preparing to meet the enemy.

“What the hell are they thinking?!” Yu shouted, garnering himself the attention of the people nearby. Executive Officer Shiba, the burly Russian man Volonov, and Ein the Replicant Girl were with him. The latter had received the same message as Yu.

“So the young soldiers have begun a coup,” she mused. “Due in no small part to Nadal’s provocations, no doubt. Unfortunately, his scheming seems to have gone over their heads. It’s a shame.”

“Seriously!” Yu said. “I can’t even imagine how the speakers must be feeling right now!”

Ein shook her head. “You misunderstand. True, I do worry for the sages, but I was referring to the youths.”

“What?”

“Nadal has likely orchestrated this in order to...be rid of them.”

“Yeah, the sages aren’t really killers, but...” Shiba sighed. “Considering they specifically came here to escape a world of constant war, bloodshed’s not exactly a new concept to them, and I doubt they’d hesitate to get their hands dirty for the greater good. If they don’t sentence them to death outright, chances are they’ll just end up imprisoned for life or banished to a deserted island.”

“A coup gives them plenty of excuse,” Volonov said with confidence. His homeland, Russia, was not unused to the other side’s assaults, especially at Primorsky Krai where they took the brunt of the fighting. As a foreign refugee, he wasn’t in a situation so different from the elves. “They can’t do squat without just cause, not without upsetting the Japanese. They’d have riots. That’s what this is about. Your elf leaders used themselves as bait to make the military boys give them a reason. Gutsy move.”

While the fluent former businessman pulled the curtain back on the elves’ plot, another commlink came to Yu and Ein.

“Hey, um, my uncle says Ijuin and Natsuki are hiding somewhere in the tower?!”

“Uh, yeah,” Ijuin replied. “We’re in a secret room with some combat droids.”

“I’m with him,” said Natsuki. “They’ve been calling me here for a while now, saying they might need some extra hands soon or something. Didn’t know this was what they had in mind.”

Of the two of them, Ijuin was audibly the most shaken, but Natsuki sounded noticeably unamused. Yu could actually picture the samurai girl frowning for a change.

“Thank god,” Aliya sighed. “Then help’s on the way.”

“Okay, slow down! We’re still figuring out which droids to use,” Ijuin said.

“I mean, I’d rather be saving lives and all, so I can be there soon, but I’m not gonna be very cute when I see your uncle. Just for the record.” Natsuki was indeed tilted.

Yu remembered what they had talked about a few days prior. He remembered the things he felt that day, myriad and wild though they were.

“Mark III,” Yu muttered. To the other self slumbering within him. “Armorize.”

Adaptive nanofactors, sparkling and many, enshrouded him at once, armoring him in a black and gold suit. The ends of the Holy Shroud around his neck fluttered in the wind behind him. Like two long wings.

“Ichinose! You did it!” Shiba cried. “And...so easily! I thought you couldn’t get it to work!”

“Everyone needs me,” Yu said.

Ein practically swooned as she studied his armored form. “You mean those words. More than any I’ve heard you speak before,” she said. “Are you ready, Yu?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “I’ll do it. I’ll be the person you’ve always known I can be.” It was a promise. To the partner who saw more in him. And to himself. “I’ve got to go! I’ll be back soon!”

“Do what you must,” said Ein. “We will hold the line until you return, by my word as queen!”

Yu activated the anti-gravity lifters and took off faster than a whirlwind. The air cracked as he instantly broke the sound barrier. He had felt sick on the day he faced the archmages. But not today.

Today he felt fine.

Yu reached his destination in just a dozen or so seconds, descending upon the wide roof of the three-hundred-meter tower.

“They’re supposed to be on the top floor,” he said to the Frame. “I need to get inside.”

The wind began to whirl as the Mark III transmitted the key signal, and a rectangle slid open in the floor to reveal an emergency exit. Yu leaped down into the observation lounge. Devicer Three in all his black and gold glory stood alone in the crowd of humans and elves.

“Three?!” an officer cried.

“We thought the elves had you!” shouted another.

“Well met, Asura of the skies!”

Soldiers and elves alike reacted with shock. Yu disregarded them and selected a weapon from his arsenal—the incapacitative paralytic sound propagator. A control window appeared on the Head Mounted Display in his visor.

“Let’s set the propagation nice and long,” he murmured inside his helmet. “One hundred eighty seconds should be good.”

Suddenly, a horrible, metallic screech whined from the Frame’s chestplate, and everyone in the lounge, both human and elf, collapsed from the non-lethal sound waves. It went on for exactly one hundred and eighty seconds as the people lay helpless on the floor, some of them merely twitching in vain attempts to move.

When the noise finally stopped, not a single person had the energy to so much as lift a finger. Among the paralyzed, Yu spotted his friend.

“Was that necessary?” she groaned through the commlink. “I think I might be sick.”

“Sorry, but I had to be safe. Unless you’d rather take a bullet in the cross fire.”

Yu scanned the room and, to his surprise, saw several officers starting to stagger to their feet. The sylphlike elves were still down for the count, but the younger, more physically fit of the group had recovered rather quickly.

One of them was Sakuma. As he stumbled on his feet, he reached for his waist, unholstered his 9mm, and unsteadily aimed it at Devicer Three. “Y-You...” he stammered, voice shaking. “You’re not Mizuki. Are you?”

His eyes were guarded behind a veil of caution. It was obvious at a glance that the Devicer before him wasn’t nearly as tall or built as their predecessor. Yu was a scrawny fourteen-year-old, and the Mark III had formed itself to fit his body. And that was to say nothing of the Holy Shroud, an entirely new addition to the Frame’s silhouette.

A mechanical beep sounded, drawing Yu’s eyes to the word “target” that had appeared before him. Beneath it was Sakuma. Drawing his gun had marked the young captain as a threat.

All of a sudden, his death was a single order away.

These people are so caught up in violence and overthrowing the city that they’re willing to completely ignore the real enemy, Yu thought. If I let them go, they might do it again.

It would be so easy to end it all here, now. How much safer the settlement would be without them. That was, after all, why Aliya’s uncle had concocted this entire scheme. These people were dangerous. Sakuma could squeeze the trigger at any moment.

Yu lifted his hand and pointed his finger at him.

Pop!

A superhardened calcium bullet fired from the Mark III’s hyper-compressed air gun. The armed officer was right there. He couldn’t miss.

And yet, Sakuma still stood there. Stupefied.

“Who...are you?” he asked. “No one else can use the Mark III. Only Mizuki can!”

The bullet Yu shot hadn’t been aimed at the man’s head, but at his weapon. Yu had offset the targeting calibrations just enough to disarm him.

Sakuma and his men were criminals. Attempted insurrection, attempted magnicide, assault, kidnapping—their crimes warranted their lives. They were a danger to society and needed to be neutralized. Nadal would have agreed.

It would be so easy.

But Yu thought of their faces. The prideful military men. The angry, barbarous adults. The racists who lived in their bubbles. The people who would have done it to Ein, or Aliya, or any of the elves just because they were different.

There are a lot of bad people in the world, Yu thought. People I’ll never agree with.

But Devicer Three would protect them anyway.

Yu turned on the voice changer. “Who am I?” he replied. His voice carried a theatrical confidence that sounded nothing like his usual self. “You said it yourself. I’m Devicer Three.”

The haughty bravado wasn’t the only thing tinting his identity, though. His voice came out shifted, distorted to sound completely androgynous.

“Y-You’re a woman?!” Sakuma shouted.

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. What does it matter to you what my gender is?” Sakuma had no words. “There’s something I want to say. To everyone.”

Yu looked around the lounge, at the trembling soldiers who had pulled themselves up and their terrified faces. Everyone else was on their knees in reverent awe of the masked Devicer of black and gold. The elves had laid themselves before their king.

“I...am a defender,” he said. “Yours. Everyone’s. I am strong, so I protect the weak. When there is suffering before me, I will not be a bystander. When I see someone in need, I will do everything within my power to save them. Humans, elves, rich, poor, no matter who they are or where they come from.”

It was almost impossible to believe that this was Yu. He thought of Ein as he spoke, drew on her confidence, and it gave him more strength than he could have possibly imagined. The words simply came to him, flowing like water.

“You will never know my face, and you will never know my name. But you will know me when I arrive to fight for those with no one to stand for them. Against my own kin if I must. You will know me as the one in the mask, the one who protects all they can.”

Against friend. For the scum of society. For murderers and criminals. Yu would fight. Because it was just as Ein said. Good and evil are just two sides of the same coin.

The last thing Takeda did was save me back in Maizuru, he recalled. The private had not been good to Yu or Ijuin, but with his dying breath, he had done something right.

It was not Yu’s place to be the judge of morality. His place was with Devicer Three, the one greater than he. The one who would protect all, wherever they were, however they could.

“I exist,” he said, “for both of you.”

Sakuma blinked. “Both?”

Yu nodded. “I will protect the elves, and I will protect the humans. Whatever your differences are, they don’t matter to me, and you will put them aside in my presence. Speaker, anything you have to say to the Defense Force can wait.”

Nadal sluggishly and robotically collected himself off the floor with a simple grunt in reply, still fighting off the effects of the noise. Yu didn’t entertain him this time.

“I’m going to need them for the time being,” Device Three said firmly. “Until then, try to keep your meddling to a minimum.”

Indirectly, this was an order to spare their lives.

Nadal bowed respectfully, much like he often would to Ein, and with all the decorum expected of a man who had once served in a royal court. “As you wish, my King of the Storm.”

“‘King of the Storm,’” Yu repeated. “Are you referring to me?”

“None other,” he replied. “You rule the droids of the sky. And, if I may be so bold to say, your manner and aspect do evoke the stately image of a liege within me. Indeed, I can hear my queen’s parting words to me as clear as day, even now.”

“So this is how the elvish royalty were like, huh?”

“Earth has a similar concept, my liege. They call it ‘noblesse oblige.’ In other words, with great power comes great responsibility.”

“No, I’m pretty sure you got that from a movie,” the Devicer pointed out plainly. It was a nerve born out of the simple fact that, right now, he wasn’t Yu Ichinose.

He used that momentum to address the Defense Force. “Well? Don’t you have positions to be taking?” Yu pointed dramatically to the sky beyond the glass wall, where the amber aurora still hung, blanketing the world above in pillars of bewitching light. “The enemy is here. If you really do want to protect your fellow man, then stand and fight with me!”

The new Devicer Three was not as brawny nor as masculine as the last. On the contrary, their gender was a mystery to most. And yet, no one in that room came even close to the sheer presence they commanded.

There could be no individual more appropriate to be the savior of the world.

3

A castle stood in the middle of Wakayama Bay. The crystalline Paramian walls sat perched upon a lotus-shaped pedestal, massive yet unsinking, like a flower floating in a swamp. For weeks, it had only been a mirage, a shapeless form undulating on Nayuta’s horizon. But precisely one hour ago, as evidenced by the lights shimmering in the sky, the crystal palace had materialized. No longer was it a ghost in the distance.

Scullchance chuckled to herself. “Go, my armies. Go and kill, burn, and conquer!”

The Lioness watched from atop her balcony overlooking the central courtyard, a sneer adorning her comely face. To humans, she had the youthfulness of a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl, but her lips wove words of violence beyond her years and her sharp eyes looked down on the soldiers with sadistic satisfaction.

The goblins were the first to leave the courtyard, carried by balloons on winds called by the archmage, drifting them along a magical current of air towards the settlement. Scaly merfolk dove into the water from the petals of the lotus pedestal, tridents in hand. And among the winged beasts were even the kings of them all—dragons. Although they were smaller than most breeds, Scullchance was impressed enough by their shrewd nature to have chosen eight of the most ferocious white dragons.

But there was still more to come. Scullchance gazed down at the expanse of blue before her from the crystal palace’s heights, as she conjured the spell for a most special guest.

“Turn, alatchakra! Oh, great wheel of flame! Bring unto this world a raging torrent of scarlet destruction!”

At the point where her gaze met the ocean, the water began to heave, until a violent tower of lava erupted from the depths. Scullchance could cast A-class spells, slaughter hundreds in the blink of an eye, but this—this she took her time on.

Gunshots filled the air. Nayuta’s harbor had become a war zone once more. Merfolk leaped from the water while goblins struck from above, their numbers easily totaling over a thousand. A militia force of about four hundred stood their ground against them. Anyone confident enough was taking shots at the balloons, attempting to drop the goblins before they could land, but it was like shooting into an ant hill, and the merfolk had already outnumbered them.

The militia fortified themselves behind portable barricades originally intended for use against terrorists, firing wildly into the increasing amount of attackers. Most of the defenders were using AK-47 copies, favored for their ease of use and distributed for free to all registered militia members. It went without saying, of course, that arming the population was dangerous for local safety and security, but the Anomalies were just too much of a threat.

7.62mm rounds pelted the merfolk, penetrating their armored scales much easier than before with the increased firepower. Goblins, too, were riddled with holes and fell in droves. And yet it wasn’t enough.

“We could really use a few more good guys on our side!” Executive Shiba yelled. He was huddled behind one of the barricades, but not in order to take potshots. In his hands, instead of a gun, was a controller, and he was currently remotely operating a basketball-shaped military droid attached to a propeller and shooting down goblin after goblin with its machine gun. “This is why I quit the military, damn it!”

“But you shoot well!” Ein noted, firing her new rifle and adding to her ever-growing body count. “I underestimated you, Shiba!” The Type 20 had been meant to replace the Type 89 a few years ago, with its shorter body and greater resistance to water, but it never managed to displace its predecessor in time. Ein found it quite punctual in their current situation, though. She frowned. “Out of ammo. I need your gun and any spare ammunition you have.”

“Be my guest! Not like I could hit the broad side of a freakin’ barn anyway!” One of the AK-47 duplicates lay strewn to his side. Ein quickly picked it up and promptly placed the crosshairs between an unlucky gremlin’s eyes. Unfortunately, the ammo wasn’t compatible with her now-discarded Type 20. “Hey, didn’t anyone tell you which weapons we’d be using? It’s pretty convenient when you can share bullets.”

“Oh, I heard.” She pulled the trigger and the goblin’s head popped. “I simply don’t see the romance in using what everyone else is. I’m very particular about my appearance, even in battle.”

“You do know this is a war, not a fashion show, right?”

Ein whipped around and scowled. “Shiba, they’re flanking us!”

The militia’s main force had taken cover facing the ocean, where the merfolk and goblins were attacking from, but a new contingent was quickly encroaching from behind—pig-faced trolls. Over five hundred of them. The behemoth super soldiers stomped closer, clad in full black armor and wielding giant battle-axes. Overhead, a number of white dragons were swooping beneath the clouds.

Shiba pulled his hair in frustration. “How did they get there?! And dragons?! You’ve got to be kidding me!”

“Firstly, I expect they were teleported. It would be child’s play for the Dharva. Secondly, pincer maneuvers are an elementary tactic.” Ein fired the AK. The bullet shot towards a gap in the troll’s armor, only for it to be deflected at the last moment. A Projectile Protection spell—the bane of humanity. The fae creatures sneered in satisfaction. Some roared and charged, bringing their axes down hard on their fleshy, defenseless enemies. Ein unsheathed a vicious kukri machete. “I suggest you find yourself a new weapon, Shiba!”

“How many times do I have to tell you people that I can’t fight?!”

Shiba had tears in his eyes, and he wasn’t alone. The militia fired on the trolls in vain while others warily prepared military sabers, spades, or anything else that could pass as a close-range weapon. But the enemy towered over them at three meters tall. They were no match, and the screams of the dying quickly replaced the gunfire.

“We were supposed to be safe!” someone cried.

“It’s a massacre! God, please, someone!”

The battlefield was a spectacle of blood and gore. But just then, they appeared. The one in black and gold arrived in the sky above the harbor, quick as the wind, the Holy Shroud fluttering at their back. It was Devicer Three.

Ein, of course, knew that “they” was actually “he,” and she cried out, “Yu!”

She also knew what had happened. The words he’d spoken at Central Tower. The path he’d chosen. She’d heard it all via commlink.

She began to chant the droids’ Gospel Code.

—Witness the truth. Envision vajra.

—See, says the Enlightened One, true strength in tathata.

—Give form to invincible serenity, flawless as the full moon.

Upon receipt of the command words, English text began to scroll across the Mark III’s HMD.

[Mantra Server Startup Complete. All PRAJNA running.]

[System Now Booting Spellbook VAJRA-SEKHARA SUTRA...]

No words were necessary between the two fated partners.

“Thanks, Ein!” Yu said. “Let’s start with the one we used last time!”

“Understood!”

Yu hovered motionlessly over the fighting, but not as himself. As Devicer Three. Arms crossed as if he were above it all metaphorically, just as he was physically.

Particles of light glittered from his body, the nano-sized machines cultivating themselves into auxiliary droids with fiendishly long talons—MUV Crow Gauntlets. Yu had used two on himself in Full-Armor mode before, but that wouldn’t be enough this time. In the blink of an eye, 3,696 robotic arms formed around the Mark III.

“Am I looking at the thousand-armed Kannon right now?!” Ijuin hollered over the commlink.

His exaggerated amazement was warranted for once. The arms arrayed themselves around the nonchalant Devicer in an enormous, intimidating circle as rays of light descended from gaps in the clouds, illuminating the black Asura Frame and all its minions in a golden luster.

From the center of the awesome sight, Yu bellowed in a clear and strong voice, both masculine and feminine, “Guns will not avail us against the trolls. They’re yours!”

The arms moved at once, shimmering like the edges of three thousand swords as they struck down with the speed of a falcon honing in on a measly field mouse. And just as mercilessly did they slice the troll’s throats and crush their heads with keen talons—five on each droid, which they brandished as dexterously as one might a sword. The fae fell dead one after the other, sliced and gored in dramatic fashion.

Such a display couldn’t possibly go unnoticed. The humans were overrun, and there were many who were saved from a raised axe just in time. Fighters trembling behind barricades did a double take when they saw the glinting metal in the sky. Once they finally realized the source of their disembodied reinforcements, the fires of their courage were reignited.

“Is that...Three?”

“He’s here! He’s back! He’s really back!”

“That’s the Mark III’s droid division! We can win this!”

And there were others joining the fight as well. Rushing to the front lines in trucks, cars, and armored military vehicles was the Defense Force, returned from the coup attempt that Devicer Three had put a stop to. Their solution to the trolls’ immunity to bullets was simple—they simply ran them over. And the merfolks’ scales might as well have been papier-mâché against their heavy machine guns. The same could be said for the goblins’ balloons.

Yu watched the tide of war change as the Defense Force’s elite squads, equipped with assault rifles and N-Type Exo-Frames, took to the field. That’s when he noticed something.

“I’m not even close to max power yet,” he murmured.

The Prayer Wheel embedded in his waist was whirring as it spun, generating immense amounts of energy, both electrical and magical. But controlling the legion of over three thousand auxiliary droid arms was, to the Frame, as effortless as wiggling one’s toe inside a cramped boot.

“Yu! The Frame’s nanofactors have been replenished to full strength!” Ein transmitted.

“You’re right. That’s...a lot of zeros! Seven trillion?!”

“It seems you’ve returned to form. And more! You’re twice the warrior you were before, Yu! I’m proud of you!”

“It’s all the Asura Frame, really,” Yu replied sheepishly.

The artificial god of destruction was a machine given the form of a man—a hybrid of device and organism. It was what allowed the suit to harmonize with its Devicer, to dynamically change with its user’s mental state. Yu finally understood that it was his indecision that had caused the Frame’s constant instability.

“The time has come to unleash Pandemonium in all its glory!” Ein declared. “The King of the Storm and all his legions are yours to command!”

“You mean the fifty thousand. That complete droid complement Ijuin’s always going on about,” Yu said. “All right, let’s do it!”

“Are we doing the thing?!” Ijuin chimed in.

Yu locked onto his position. A lab in Central Tower. Perfect.

“But I don’t know if I’ll be able to control them all at once,” Yu added. “Ijuin, I’ll need your help. Like before.”

“M-Me?”

“I need to be Devicer Three. I want you to lead the Pandemonium droids.”

“Every general needs a lieutenant...” Ijuin murmured. He seemed to finally understand something. “Leave it to me! You do your thing, and I’ll do mine!”

“Yu— I mean, Three,” Aliya interjected. “We have eight white dragons on us at Central Tower! I think they’re coming right for our throat!”

“I’m on my way,” Yu said at once.

“Are we slaying dragons now?” Natsuki joined in. “Nice! Leave one for me!”

“I’ll see what I can do on my end,” said Aliya.

“By the way, Yu, I like your new act. If we all make it out of this, I’ve got another noogie ready just for you!” Natsuki added.

“And you will have to enlighten me as to what this ‘noogie’ is,” Ein said pointedly.

Listening to his friends, Yu realized something. He was a weak, small man, and he needed a mask to become anything more than that. But weak though he may be, the people he cared about were with him. Supporting him.

Devicer Three wasn’t just one person anymore. It was all of them. As long as they were together, as weak as he was, he knew...

“I can do this!” Devicer Three cried. “Mark III, by the name of Rudra, release your armies!”

4

“Holy crap, these numbers.” Ijuin’s eyes went wide. “That Prayer Wheel puts out insane energy. Three gigajoules per second... Wow. And this ‘prana’ thing is the unit for magic, I’m guessing. Seventy thousand per second. They weren’t kidding when they said he blew the last Devicer out of the water.”

He was in the autonomous droid lab on Central Tower’s twenty-fifth floor. During the coup, he’d hidden himself in a secret room and used his nanomachines to hack everything he could for information. But when the situation changed and the Anomalies became the primary threat, he rushed to the testing room he and Shiba often used. The empty space made it perfect for keeping up a multitude of three-dimensional holograms.

“Let’s see, I need the Mark III’s specs, a map of the settlement, air surveillance, ally positions...” Ijuin waved his hands, his eyes darting from one place to the next. “Screw it, just show me everything!” Images and stereoscopic projections appeared at his command. His nanomachines served the same purpose as the sages’ wrist computers. “Now how do we allocate this energy... But there’s so many options! Which ones do I go with?”

“Ijuin. Shiba has something to tell you. I’ll patch him in now.”

“Lady Ein?!”

“Ijuin.” Shiba’s voice followed. “I just sent a list to you via Ein. It contains my own recommended selections. I hope it helps!”

“Thanks!” Another window manifested before him, and he proceeded to send its contents to the Mark III via commlink with his good pal, Devicer Three. More specifically, however, the data was transmitted to the ashen stone in the Frame’s chest. “The Ars Magna Unit,” he muttered. “If that’s the key to droid cultivation, then I’m counting on you!”

The ring of light glowed in his palm as he sent the order.

“Um, appreciate the assist, Ein.”

“It was nothing. I only synchronized my nanomachines with your...laptop, I believe it was called?” Ein was unfazed by the older man’s awkward politeness. Earlier, she had been using her right palm to connect herself with the computer on Shiba’s lap, who then promptly and very hastily put together the file for upload. “We’re all playing our part. It’s time I play mine.”

The elf girl closed her eyes and took a deep breath, focusing her mind. The world fell away. There was no war. There was no fear.

Militia volunteers and former Defense Force soldiers were fighting for their lives alongside the MUV Crow Gauntlets that continued to enact Yu’s orders. Much of the hulking fae had been culled by their talons, and now they were seeing to the destruction of the goblins and merfolk. And the arm droids did so with gruesome efficiency, making use of a multitude of hidden armaments, from air guns in their fingertips to electromagnetic heat radiators in their palms.

And now it was time for the queen to take up her own sword.

Ein stood tall, and with a resounding voice ringing straight from the core of her gut, she sang a heaven-bound verse to the King of the Storm.

—Oh, Traveler. Heed me, oh Traveler,

—Wanderer of the realm and distances vast,

—Rejoice, oh Siddha. The awakening has begun.

“Ein’s Gospel!” Yu cried.

The Prayer Wheel picked up speed, until the whirring became chanting. A chorus of souls, of the priests and priestesses residing within the Wheel of Orison.

“Gate Gate Paragate! Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha! Gate Gate Paragate! Parasamgate Bodhi Svaha!”

And then, the nanofactors gushed out in more abundance than ever before. Even the somber and meager tints of sunlight that absconded through both the amber aurora and the rolling clouds were blotted by the trillions of particles. As the Mark III sped over the settlement, the golden sheet blanketed the city below, droids beginning to emerge from the shimmering, primordial sea in the sky.

Ten thousand MUV Chakrams, the very first Yu had used. With their tapered, serrated edges, the bladed rings set out in search of prey to lacerate, be they on land, in water, or airborne.

There was much use to be found in the MUV Clay-Dolls as well, despite their deceptive appearance. The dolls were barely a meter tall and had stubby, immobile limbs, coupled with an oversized head and pair of eyes, and they normally served reconnaissance purposes, but now their mission was to seek out and aid allies in need. Of these, there were five thousand.

Aiding these droids were twenty thousand MUV Hippocrates—paper-esque droids about the shape and thickness of a poker card. They would fly about in search of those needing medical attention, then attach themselves to afflicted areas, stopping bleeding, acting as an antitoxin, and administering emergency medications directly in the field.

But these were on the smaller end of soldiers in the battalion.

“I’m sending these to the tower!” Ijuin said. “The dragons are really—Whoa! I swear I just saw something white fly by the window just now!”

“I trust you, Ijuin,” said Yu. “Protect the elves!”

One of the largest among Rudra’s army was the MUV Puppeteer—the massive forearm and fist of a giant robot turned loyal familiar that was at least the size of a fighter jet. Six of these rocketed towards the middle of the city.

And with them were six fighter jets of a much more literal variety—MUV Silent Raptor. At the front of their sharp, angular forms, though, were two arms with perfectly opposable thumbs. The right of which was holding a hand axe. This variety of droid could engage in dogfights on both land and in the air.

Among the machines in the thick of it was a more subtle division.

A window appeared in Yu’s visor. “Someone needs help.”

One thousand MUV Bumblebees were monitoring the situation from above, all over the city. Yu confirmed the coordinates of the report one had just sent him and descended at once.

At the edge of the outer block, in one of the more urban areas, a lone, middle-aged man was screaming and firing his Type 89 wildly. Whether he had been separated from the main force on the front lines or simply decided he would fight alone, it mattered little to the goblins who were closing in on their target. The gremlins were taking their time to enjoy this one.

The man had taken out at least half of them in his frenzy, but his luck had just run out.

“God damn it!”

He was fresh out of bullets. The goblins heard the clack of his trigger but no gunshot, and they nocked their poison arrows with nasty grins.

And that was when Yu arrived. He held out his hand and fired a volley of superhardened calcium bullets, instantly decimating the enemy.

“I may not be there to save you again,” he said in Devicer Three’s androgynous voice. “But I’m glad I was this time.”

“Th-Three!” the man blubbered, stopping Yu moments before he started to take off again. Yu looked back and realized that he recognized him. It was the drunk who had vilified Devicer Three after the merfolk attack a few days ago. He prepared himself for another round of insults, but the man was silent for a while, until finally, he said, “You’re back.”

“So it would seem.” Yu might have had more words to say had the man said he was “alive,” but the fact that he hadn’t was likely meaningless.

The man reeked of booze and his uniform was a mess, his beard unkempt, both born out of a lack of desire to rectify either. He was a pitiful sight. But in his eyes, as they gazed up at Devicer Three, was a glint of lucidity.

“You don’t remember me?” he asked. “You saved me before too. Remember? It was raining.”

His face was bright with adoration for his hero. The anger he had felt had likely not come from malice, but betrayal. Disillusionment from being abandoned by the one he looked up to more than anyone.

“And I’ll do it again if I can, but I can’t promise you anything,” Yu said through the voice changer. “If you’re out of bullets or too tired to fight, find somewhere to hide.”

“No,” the man said firmly. His words suddenly had weight, now that they weren’t slurred. “I’ll get reloaded and keep up the fight. That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it?”

Yu lightly waved his hand in place of a reply. The next instant, he was high in the air.

He learned something just now. That man—his will had been lost at the bottom of a bottle, and yet he’d been moved by Devicer Three. He’d displayed respect. This, Yu discovered, was another aspect of what it meant to be a hero.

“Three!” Aliya called. “Look! This is happening near the portal-keep!”

Footage appeared in Yu’s visor and began to play. “That’s—Is that a giant?!”

In the waters near Nayuta, directly next to the crystalline castle, a stream of lava was erupting from the ocean, and it was morphing. Changing. Into something anthropomorphic. Limbs sprouted and bubbled from the fiery torrent, and three cavities were hollowed out on the face—two eyes and a mouth.

The bottom half of the gelatinous lava colossus was concealed beneath the ocean, and the water around its waist boiled violently. From there to its head alone, the monster measured 118 meters tall, dwarfing many of the surrounding buildings.

“I can’t identify it! It’s either extremely rare, or the archmage created it entirely themself!” Aliya was flustered. Yu could hear it. “Its functional name for now will be ‘lava giant’!”

“Roger that. Heading there now.”

They would have to manage against the dragons at Central Tower on their own. The anti-gravity lifters carried Yu across the city at max speed, towards the newborn, burning leviathan.

Central Tower stood, fittingly, in the middle of the central block at three hundred meters tall, with the giant, imitation Prayer Wheel towering at sixty meters nearby. Together, the two buildings supported the needs and wants of the entire settlement—making them high value targets during a war. The perfect prey to send eight white dragons after.

“I’ll handle defense of the tower and the wheel!” Aliya shouted.

“Thanks! I don’t know how I was gonna do that and manage the droids around the city at the same time,” Ijuin replied with audible relief.

When Aliya had first made it to the droid lab’s testing room, it took her a minute to process the sight she saw there. Ijuin sat cross-legged in the middle of a kaleidoscope of holograms projected all around the room. He stared at the floor where bird’s-eye footage of Nayuta depicted enemy and ally positions with dots of varying colors, each corresponding to a different kind of droid or Anomaly. No further information was given. No name tags, no numbers, no data. But the scant amount of information was plenty for Ijuin, and the abundance of information being displayed by the myriad holograms similarly bothered him none.

“Medical, focus on that area,” he muttered, pointing with a baton he’d found from lord knows where. “Kannon Team, deploy to the shopping streets and flush out any stragglers.”

If a device was nano-compatible, Ijuin could crack it. He parsed the constant flow of information, deciphered the best course of action, and enacted it like a conductor to his orchestra, or a shogi player to his pieces.

“You know,” Aliya started to say before she could stop herself, “you almost look pretty cool, for the chubby nerd character.”

“We do not fat-shame in this house, Aliya!”

Meanwhile, just outside the window, a surreal dogfight was underway between the eight dragons and the squadron of giant arms and fighter planes. Aliya quickly turned to step outside and link up with the droids.

The enemies were officially designated as “white dragons,” and this particular breed of drake trended towards the smaller end of the spectrum, generally reaching about fifteen meters in length. But what they lacked in raw strength, they made up for with pure speed and dexterity. Even compared to their red relatives, who could dance across the sky like a swallow, these beasts were unmatched in the air.

A jet-black MUV Silent Raptor tailed one of the dragons endlessly, firing from behind, but a fraction of a second was all it needed to lose sight of its target. The creature sensed the danger with its animalistic instincts, swiveled out of the way, then reappeared behind the Silent Raptor in an instant.

White dragons hunted with deadly ice breath, inducing frostbite in their prey by emitting a frigid flurry from their maws that also pelted their foe with pointy icicles. Pilots the world over had met their end to that very attack.

Not even missiles, supersonic jets, or any other modern long-range weaponry had proved consistently effective against the otherworldly reptiles. Nothing could match their reaction speed, their beastly instincts, their sheer power—but most troublesome of all was, as always, their magical nature. Even when targeted by an auto-tracking missile, the monsters could seemingly vanish out of its path, only to reemerge from nothing and shoot it down with their breath. If it had been an F-15 fighter jet, the machinery would subsequently fail and the pilot would freeze to death in the cockpit.

But the MUV Silent Raptors had no pilots. The anti-gravity lifters allowed the Silent Raptor to practically swim through the air and reposition itself behind the dragon once more. It fired again, but too late. The dragon was already gone. The beast came directly from above this time, reaching down to slam the jet with its hind legs. Too late again. The Silent Raptor swerved right back behind the dragon.

Central Tower was swarming with similar dogfights all over—a never-ending game of tag between the droids and the drakes. Had the Silent Raptors been occupied by pilots, they would have been long dead from the insane g-forces. The maneuvers they were conducting wouldn’t have been possible. But still, the stalemate showed no sign of ending.

“Now!” Aliya thrust out her fist, and a MUV Puppeteer hurled itself towards a dragon in the heat of a chase. The steel fist slammed into the snowy reptile’s body and pummeled it straight into the ground. “Finish it!”

One of the fighter jets broke off and descended with fluidity so graceful that not even a VTOL could have replicated the motion. And it did so while holding a hand axe. Sound waves propagated through the edge, creating a vibroblade, and it hummed through the air as the arm brought it down over the dragon’s neck—a hair too slow. The dragon, a beast driven into a corner with nothing to lose, sprang up and dodged the blow. It landed back on the ground on all fours and took a wide, firm stance. It almost looked like a dinosaur.

Aliya was not entertained, however.

“Ugh, what am I supposed to do?!” she groaned.

“I might have an idea!”

Natsuki kicked off the ground and up to the grounded dragon’s snout. With a flutter of her peony furisode and a flash of her monomolecular blade, she buried the katana deep into the beast’s eye.

The dragon roared, at last in pain. Natsuki, despite what her usual antics might lead one to believe, could not fly, and she had been waiting patiently for just this moment.

“Whoa!”

“Natsuki!”

But the dragon easily flung the girl off with a sharp flick of its head. The white monster beat its wings angrily and took to the air once more, unconcerned with the pest on the ground.

“Gah, this isn’t gonna work! This guy makes my sword look like a toothpick!”

Natsuki stuck the landing and emerged unscathed. Unfortunately, not even the kabukimono samurai girl could stand up to the king of reptiles. Aliya’s shoulders slumped dejectedly.

“Wait...” she murmured suddenly.

Aliya ordered the droids to continue as they were and scurried out of the lab. Ijuin was too focused to even notice her leave.

She flew into the elevator, rode it down to the ninth floor, then dashed into the Other World Archive for Culturally Significant Artifacts—otherwise known as the Treasury. Hurrying through and around the various items on display, she came to one in particular and stopped.

“Natsuki, do you have a minute?” Aliya asked through the commlink.

“You know I love our chats, but I’m sorta fighting a dragon right now,” she replied. “Can it wait?”

“Not if you want to win.” There, inside a display case all by itself, was the Green Dragon Crescent Blade. And below its deadly, curved edge, down the long shaft at the ferrule, was a wheel. “There’s a weapon here, and I think it has a Prayer Wheel. A small one, like the Mark III has.”

“Wait, what?!”

Aliya’s head started to tingle.

EXPLICATIONS

| PARAM AND THE ELVISH KINGDOMS |

Yu: So we were in the space between Earth and the other side, right? Then if we’d gone in the right direction, would we have ended up in your home, Ein?

Ein: Of course. Beyond the Void lies our soil—the lands of Param.

Aliya: Apparently my mom and uncle used to live in some place called the Wind Kingdom.

Ein: Vibhram’ladri. It was ruled by my original, Queen Liricamaja. There were the Earth, Fire, and Water Kingdoms as well, each governed by sovereigns descended from the old blood of Yakshia, of which there are four holy lines.

Yu: “Were”?

Ein: The ones you call the archmages laid waste to them.

| ANOMALY NOMENCLATURE |

Yu: I’ve been wondering about that “Yakshia” word. I heard it a lot from Professor Chloe, and from Ein too.

Ijuin: Yeah, same. What’s it mean? Is it a race?

Ein: Exactly. In our tongue, the term “Yakshia” functionally serves the same purpose as your “elf” does. Likewise, what you call “demons,” we would normally call “rakshasa.” We simply adapted our nomenclature for the sake of ease of communication on Earth.

Aliya: ...I think that was Nadal’s idea, wasn’t it?

Ijuin: Was it?!

Aliya: Pretty sure. He went nuts for movies and games after coming here, and he noticed that the elves in RPGs and fantasy and stuff resembled his people surprisingly closely.

Yu: So they saw the coincidence and ran with it?

Aliya: To quote my uncle, “It is highly unlikely that this is mere happenstance. Rather, it would stand to reason that both of our worlds, Earth and Param, were once connected closely enough that we could intermingle, share knowledge, and blend cultures.”

Ein: He theorized that the human perception of elves was based on stories of our people, passed down through the ages.

Ijuin: So you applied the same idea to the Anomalies and made it nice and accessible for us Earthlings. Huh.