The cloud-grey beanie was still pulled low, the last golden firefly winking out just as Winter appeared.

  She didn’t knock; she manifested, one moment, empty air near the lavender-painted door, the next, a whirlwind of dark braids, golden eyes, and simmering impatience. The air crackled with the scent of hot sand.

  "Up," Winter commanded, her voice resonating with an edge that vibrated the plushies. "Training. Now."

  Butter didn’t uncurl. She peered out from her nest, a sliver of a defiant, pink-rimmed gaze under the beanie. "What's the point?" The words were muffled, yet they cut. "I already beat you. I remember the sound your shoulder made." It was bravado, a tissue-thin shield against the crushing weight of Lucien’s mansion.

  Winter’s gaze flickered, not with anger, but with something colder, more dangerous. A memory, sharp and recent, overlaid her vision of the petulant girl.

  Three days ago. A satellite feed, enhanced and stabilized by her own optical nerves. A dusty border skirmish, now being hailed as a "miracle." The locals whispered about a "blur," a "ghost with pink eyes and a beanie."

  But Winter’s eyes saw past the pixels and the myth-making. She saw the raw data of a disaster in the making.

  She saw Butter, a pastel smear of motion, flow through a squad of insurgents. Not with lethal force, but with a reckless, performative flair. Her hands didn’t strike flesh; they seized rifles, her fingers squeezing until the hardened steel crumpled like tinfoil, shattering the weapons without harming the men holding them. It was a choice. A luxury.

  She saw her blur past an armored personnel carrier, Harmony flashing out to kiss its side before she vanished from the frame. A heartbeat later, the Resound detonated. The vehicle didn't just stop; it folded inward, its own armored hull collapsing like a stomped can as the stored force erupted from within. A spectacular, wasteful display of power that neutralized a vehicle but left its occupants dazed, but alive.

  That was the confidence that would get her killed. The Syndicate’s enforcers were not slow-moving lumber. They were surgeons of violence. They wouldn’t stand still while she landed a hit. They wouldn’t grant her the courtesy of a fair fight. They would phase through her strikes, scramble her bio-signatures, and put a neural disruptor through her eye before the word "Resound" fully formed in her mind. Her little escapades had built a house of cards on a foundation of luck and inferior opposition. It was a confidence that was a hair's breadth from a death sentence.

  She had to be humbled. Now. Once again. She had to learn that survival was not a performance.

  "Street brawls against slow-moving lumber are not mastery, child," Winter said, her voice a low vibration that made the plushies tremble. The final word landed not like a slap, but like a tombstone.

  Butter scowled, but she moved. Years of ingrained obedience, tangled with resentment, propelled her off the bed. She snatched the fuzzy blue sketchbook, clutching it like a shield, and followed Winter’s rigid back out of the candy-scented sanctuary, past the silent chrome servants, down corridors that hummed with hidden power.

  The training room wasn’t a room; it was a fortress dimension. Vast. Cold. Lit by harsh white panels in a vaulted ceiling miles high. The floor and walls weren’t metal or concrete, but seamless, featureless grey material that absorbed sound and light, radiating an aura of absolute, unbreakable inertia. It felt less like a space and more like the inside of a god’s fist.

  Winter stopped in the center, turning. The air around her shimmered faintly with contained power. "Defend yourself."

  Butter barely had time to drop into a Tai Chi stance, Harmony snapping into her grip.

  Winter didn’t charge. She vanished.

  Not invisibility. A blur, a displacement too fast for her eyes to track.

  Butter barely raised Harmony in time.

  Winter’s fist connected... and the world split.

  The impact didn’t just knock her back; it folded the air itself, a shockwave cratering the dimension’s unbreakable floor. Butter’s bones sang with the vibration, her teeth clacking together like dice in a cup.

  Five times stronger.

  The realization slithered down her spine. Her magic scraped against Winter’s aura, recoiling at the density. In the street, Winter had been a glacier; vast, but measurable. Now? A tectonic plate, grinding her into the bedrock of this artificial world.

  Butter gasped as a searing heat erupted against her sternum. The amulet, once shattered, now throbbed like a second heartbeat, its fractures stitching themselves back together with threads of her own magic.

  She could feel it drinking from her veins, syphoning power to reform. The cost?

  A wave of dizziness. The edges of her vision fuzzing static-gray, like a TV losing signal.

  It’s healing itself... by cannibalizing me.

  Winter blurred again. Butter flinched preemptively... but the strike came from below. A heel uppercut to her ribs, lifting her off her feet. Panukin. The recognition was a cold spike of terror alongside the physical blow. This wasn't Winter's usual feral, claw-first style. This was something else, brutal, systematic, and utterly efficient. It was the difference between being mauled by an animal and being dismantled by a machine.

  For one suspended second, Butter floated above the abyss of Winter’s power, watching her own blood mist the air in lazy droplets.

  Then the backhand came.

  The half-regenerated amulet cracked further, its violet light guttering. Butter hit the ground chin-first, vision swimming with black and gold starbursts.

  Butter’s magic yelled a warning before her brain caught up, calculating trajectories, measuring kinetic force.

  Without the amulet...

  Winter's last strikes wouldn't have cracked ribs.

  They would’ve punched through her sternum like wet parchment, Winter’s claws exiting through Butter’s spine in a spray of bone shards and lung tissue.

  The math was inescapable. The amulet wasn’t just dampening blows, it was keeping her insides inside.

  Butter's breath hitched as the amulet's warmth spread through her ribs, not healing, but claiming.

  Her magic hadn't asked permission.

  It had funneled itself into the fractures, a self-inflicted transfusion, stitching crystal back together with liquid strands of her own power.

  It chose for me.

  The realization curdled in her gut. Even broken, even abused, her magic would rather drain her dry than let her die.

  Winter loomed over her, braids crackling with static. No smirk. No taunt. Just a silent, surgical intensity.

  Flicker. An elbow cracked against her ribs from the left. Flicker. A heel slammed into the back of her knee from the right, dropping her. Flicker. A palm strike rocketed toward her face.

  This time, Butter anticipated it, barely. She twisted, Harmony slicing through air to intercept. But Winter wasn’t aiming for her.

  Her clawed hand, now wrapped in sharp golden light, slashed not at Butter, but at the amethyst gem at her throat.

  CRACK!

  The sound was too familiar. Like breaking promises. Like memory.

  The gem flared brilliantly, then dimmed. A large, fresh, jagged fracture split its surface, glowing faintly with residual energy. The ward’s protective warmth sputtered, weakened.

  Butter froze. Then fury ignited.

  It wasn’t just the gem. It was Lucien’s cold assessment. Her missing father. The pressure. The judgment. The absence. Her mother’s name always unspoken. Her power always questioned.

  No more.

  She dropped Harmony. It clattered across the floor. The crack in the gem mirrored the one in her chest. She didn’t just drop Harmony, she let it fall like a promise she could no longer keep.

  She tore open the fuzzy blue sketchbook. Her fingers flew to a page scrawled in raw, furious ink. Not whimsy. Rage.

  A hulking, night-skinned behemoth with a maw like a collapsing star, claws like shattered mountains, eyes that burned with annihilating light:

  'Manifest!' Butter screamed, her entire soul pouring into the page.

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The summoning tore through her like a reverse lightning strike, power exploding outward from her marrow as reality itself shrieked in protest.

  Blood erupted from her nose in a hot arc, each droplet burning with spent magic as it spattered against the floor. Her legs became liquid, the world tilting violently as her vision tunneled, until her palm slapped against the cold floor, fingers curling into claws as she fought to remain conscious.

  The copper tang of blood filled her mouth. Her heartbeat pounded in her eardrums like war drums. Every nerve ending screamed in the aftermath, raw and exposed, as if her magic had flayed her from the inside out.

  A single drop hung trembling from her chin, then fell, sizzling as it struck the featureless floor.

  The air screamed. Reality tore above the training floor. A colossal claw, blacker than void, ripped through the fabric of the dimension. A deafening ROAR followed, vibrating every molecule.

  Oblivion was coming.

  Its presence bent the light. Warped the dimension. Its breath gathered, a cataclysm ready to erase everything.

  Winter braced, white light erupting around her with flecks of gold. But her eyes widened.

  This was catastrophe.

  Before the Maw could release its apocalyptic breath, the air parted, not torn, but elegantly sliced.

  Yume stood between them.

  Her golden collar was gone. And without it, she wasn’t wilting.

  She was incandescent.

  The collar hit the floor with a sound like a shackle breaking. For the first time in years, Yume stood tall.

  Her blunt bangs whipped back in an unseen wind. Her shadowed eyes blazed with pure, crackling yellow lightning. Bolts arced off her like wrath given form, grounding harmlessly into the floor, filling the air with ozone.

  The behemoth’s maw tore across the distance not with muscle, but with shadow, its jaws snapping shut with the sound of a universe ending, clamping over the space where Yume’s head had been.

  But she was already in the air, a helix of lightning and fury, having moved faster than annihilation itself.

  She pointed a single finger at Oblivion’s skull.

  A trickle of lightning, blinding and consuming, struck the behemoth between the eyes with a sound like a thousand panes of shattering crystal.

  The Maw didn’t roar. It let out a high-frequency scree, that was abruptly severed as it folded inward, collapsing into a wisp of acrid smoke and absolute silence in a heartbeat.

  Gone. Like it had never existed.

  The silence hit harder than the roar.

  Yume’s power receded as she landed. She stooped, picked up the collar. Her fingers trembled slightly as she clasped it around her neck. The runes flared blue. Suppression snapped back in place. Her shoulders bowed. Her light dimmed.

  But her voice held power.

  "Out."

  It wasn’t loud. It was absolute.

  The word vibrated through Butter’s bones. She flinched. The fury drained from her all at once, leaving behind a skull full of shattered glass.

  Her vision splintered, the training room doubling, then tripling, shapes melting at the edges like wet paint. A white-hot screw twisted behind her eyes with every throb of her pulse.

  She swayed, knees buckling, only staying upright through sheer stubbornness. More blood dripped from her nose to her chin, each drop sizzling where it hit the sketchbook, her magic literally burning her from the inside out.

  As the door hissed shut behind her, sealing her out, Butter staggered to the wall, fighting to stay conscious and pressed her ear to the cold, seamless surface. Muffled vibrations only.

  One word filtered through.

  Crook.

  A chill ran down her spine.

  Crook?

  Her eyes narrowed. Her mind flashed to Lucien’s awkward silences. A photograph once burned. A letter with ink scratched out.

  The name didn't belong to her father. And yet it was attached to her like shadow.

  She didn't know why, but it made her heart pound.

  She sank to the floor, the cracked amulet throbbing cold against her throat.

  Her veins glowed blue under her skin for hours, the Maw’s echo still chewing at her magic from the inside.

  ///

  Inside the room, Yume turned a cold gaze toward Winter.

  “This... kono zankoku-sa wa kunren nanka ja nai (この残酷さは訓練なんかじゃない - this cruelty isn't training).” Her voice was a low, trembling blade. “You use her as your butsukeru ningyō (ぶつける人形 - punching doll)... nazeka? (なぜか - why?)... because Pariisu wa inai (パリスはいない - Paris is gone).”

  The name cracked the air like a whip.

  Winter flinched. All the divine fury drained. Her golden eyes, suddenly vulnerable met Yume’s.

  "I... know," she whispered. No resonance. Just a woman’s broken voice. "I know it wasn’t her fault."

  The confession unlocked a door she’d sealed shut a decade ago. The sterile chill of the training room vanished, replaced by the antiseptic sting of a memory.

  She was ten. A number. W-9.

  A cold muzzle of reinforced steel bit into the bridge of her nose and cheeks, stifling her screams, her pleas, even her whimpers. It was bolted shut, a permanent fixture. Her world was reduced to the metallic taste of her own blood and the rhythmic drag of heavy chains on polished linoleum.

  Two operatives, faceless in their bird-like masks, dragged her by the elbows. Her feet, bare and bloody, left smears on the too-bright floor. Every part of her hurt. Her left arm was a tapestry of brutal purple bruises from yesterday’s impact tests. Her right was laced with fine, white scars that itched as they knit themselves closed, the last of the bone-saw’s work finally healing. Her skin was clammy, her body hollowed out, drained of pints of blood they’d siphoned for "vitality analysis."

  A sharp, crawling sensation pierced the base of her skull. A feeling like ice water trickling down her vertebrae.

  She knew. She didn’t need to turn her head. She didn’t dare.

  The air in the corridor changed. It grew still and heavy, like the moment before a thunderstorm, but cold. So cold. The hum of the lights seemed to dampen, replaced by a silence that felt... attentive.

  She was there.

  Winter’s eyes, wide with a fear that surpassed the pain of the experiments, flickered upward. A floor above, just behind the metal railing that overlooked the transport corridor, she stood.

  The Albino Woman.

  Her skin was so pale it seemed to glow under the harsh fluorescents, translucent, like paper over bone. Her hair, the color of fresh-fallen snow, was pulled back severely. And her eyes... bruised purple irises in a sea of startling white. They held no pity, no curiosity, no malice. Nothing human. They were the eyes of a geologist studying an interesting fracture in a rock.

  In one hand, she held a large, raw tomato. She took a slow, deliberate bite. The skin ruptured with a wet pop, the red flesh and seeds bursting, a single drop of juice like blood tracing a path down her pale wrist. She didn't wipe it away. She just watched, chewing with a placid, unnerving rhythm. The mundane act, performed in that place of sterile horror, was a violation in itself.

  A primal snarl tore from Winter's throat, muffled by the steel muzzle. Every muscle in her battered body tensed, coiling to launch herself at the railing, to smash that placid face, to make her feel something. It was an instinct as pure as it was suicidal.

  The operative on her right didn't yank her back in anger. His grip on her elbow became a vise, his other hand clamping down on her shoulder, physically rooting her to the spot. He didn't speak, but the message was transmitted through the desperate pressure of his fingers, a silent, urgent scream into her flesh: Don't. Look down. You will die a gruesome death. She is not a target. She is a natural disaster.

  Winter quickly averted her eyes back to the floor, her heart hammering against her ribs. The scrutiny of those purple eyes was worse than the bone-saw. The experiments tested her body’s limits. The woman's gaze felt like it was testing her soul’s, and finding it... lacking. Or perhaps, too interesting.

  Present Day – Training Room

  She turned toward the sealed door. Her gaze softened to a look of grief, tenderness, something too dangerous to name.

  "She just... she reminds me so much of her. I hate it. The way she looks. The way she moves. The defiance. That terrifying power wrapped in fragility..." Her voice cracked.

  "Crook."

  The name left her lips like a splinter being pulled out, slow and deliberate, the wound beneath still raw.

  To Yume, the name landed like a tombstone on the soul.

  Not a noun. A verb.

  Crook bent things, realities, loyalties, bones, until they fit her design. And now she was dead.

  Hopefully.

  Prayerfully.

  Gods, let her stay that way.

  The prayer was a reflex, born from a memory that still chilled her blood, even decades later. For a moment, the sterile training room vanished, replaced by the phantom scent of ozone and rain-soaked asphalt.

  She was fifteen again, in a Tokyo back alley, a canyon of neon and shadow. Landing in a crouch, her blue-streaked hair plastered to her sweaty forehead, her enchanted pistols smoking.

  Before her, the twitching halves of the Bat-Spawn demon dissolved into foul-smelling smoke. The creature had been fast, its claws like scythes, its shriek a weapon that vibrated in her bones. But not fast enough. Her magic bullet had cut through it like reality itself was the thing being split.

  She didn’t celebrate. She never did. Her senses, honed by her powers, were already scanning the next threat. And they found one.

  The air... changed.

  It wasn’t the presence of another monster. This was different. A void where noise should be. A pocket of absolute, unnatural stillness at the far end of the rain-slicked street.

  A young woman stood there.

  Just... standing. Watching.

  She was pale, dressed in simple, dark clothes. One hand hung limp at her side, while the other played with a yoyo, the plastic shell tracing a lazy, hypnotic up-and-down in the gloom. Her hair was white. Her face was blank.

  For a fleeting moment, Yume’s instincts were merely concerned, not yet terrified. A civilian, lost and in danger.

  “Kaero. (帰ろ - Go home),” Yume called out, her voice cutting through the alley’s tension. “Koko wa anzen janai. (ここは安全じゃない - It's not safe here).”

  The woman didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. The yoyo continued its lazy, metronomic descent and ascent.

  And then Yume took a closer look.

  The yoyo wasn't just moving; it was moving with a perfect, impossible consistency, each arc a flawless replication of the last, utterly untouched by gravity or air resistance. The woman’s stillness wasn't caution or fear, it was the absolute stillness of a predator that has no need to fidget, because the world around it is already its domain. Her eyes, a bruised purple, weren't looking at the alley; they were looking at her, through her, as if she were a diagram on a page.

  She was utterly, terrifyingly ordinary-looking, which in that moment, was the most frightening thing of all. Her presence was so random, so placid amidst the urban chaos, it made the fine hairs on Yume’s arms stand up.

  Instinct, older than reason, screamed.

  Yume whipped around, pistols rising. She didn’t call out. She fired.

  The magic bullet, a compressed star of temporal energy and annihilating heat, moved hundreds of times faster than sound. It crossed the distance in less than a blink.

  The woman’s free hand; the one not occupied with the yoyo, moved. It wasn't a blur of speed, but a simple, economical edit in reality, like swatting a fly. Her fingers closed.

  The bullet... stopped.

  The world’s sound rushed back in a deafening wave. Yume’s breath froze in her lungs. Her shot, the one that could bisect a demon, was held pinched between the woman’s thumb and forefinger as if it were a spent cigarette butt. It sizzled faintly, then went dark. Dodging it was one thing; catching it, without the sudden stop or the enchanted metal's backlash ripping her entire hand from her wrist, was incomprehensible.

  The woman’s head tilted. Those disturbing, purple eyes focused on Yume. Her lips parted, and she spoke softly, in flawless Japanese. "Nigenai de. (逃げないで - Don't run.)" A ghost of a smile touched her lips. "Sugu soba ni iku kara. (すぐそばに行くから - I'll be right there with you.)"

  The threat level was so absolute, so reality-bending, that Yume’s golden collar gave a violent shudder. The hidden clasps strained with a sound of screaming metal, the intricate runes flaring a blinding, panicked blue as the mechanism nearly came undone on its own. But a tiny, iridescent hand slammed against the clasp, snapping it firmly shut. Blur, materializing for a nanosecond, shook her head fiercely at Yume, her own wide eyes filled with a terror that mirrored Yume's own. The message was clear: Unleashing that power here would not save you. It would only make you a brighter beacon for her.

  Then the woman was just... there. In front of her. No movement. No transition. Like she had edited the space between them out of existence.

  Two pale fingers, cold as grave dirt, aimed to gouge out Yume’s eyes.

  Yume was paralyzed, staring into her own death reflected in those empty irises. It was only as the fingers neared her face that she realized her right hand was empty. She had taken one of her pistols. Crook had disarmed her in the same non-motion she had used to cross the alley.

  Then, a tiny, violent tug at the golden collar around her neck. The world tore like wet paper.

  She stumbled, nausea overwhelming her, onto the gravel roof of a building an entire country away. The air smelled of desert and exhaust. For a single, heart-stopping moment, she thought she saw a flicker of something pale at the edge of the rooftop, a glint of plastic, a fall of white hair, but when she blinked, it was gone.

  Blur vibrated in the air before her, its usual manic light dimmed to a terrified flicker, clutching her missing pistol.

  “Yikes,” the fairy chattered, its voice trembling. “She gave me the creeps.”

  Present Day – Training Room.

  Yume's fingers instinctively twitched toward her collar. “The Kasasagi (カササギ - Magpies)... you think they want Butter because... they believe she can...”

  She couldn’t finish it.

  “...Kanojo o tsuremodosu (彼女を連れ戻す - bring her back)?”

  Winter didn’t answer. Her hand rose, not to strike, but to cover her own mouth, a reflex left from years of muzzled screams. Her silence was confirmation.