MikoMisa Games

The two—the fractured two thirds of a Neapolitan swirl—stepped through the steel doors, their hinges wailing out in pain. The sound echoed, swallowed by the cavernous unknown ahead. Beyond lay a passage flanked by figures lined up against the walls—clones, their vacant masks trailing the duo’s path like silent sentinels, as if they were simply waypoints in Uiharu’s cruel game. Mikoto felt her stomach tighten, a strange unease pressing up against her ribs. Were they standing there of their own volition? Were they stripped of the personalities they had once painstakingly cultivated for good? The thought haunted her, an itch at the back of her mind she couldn’t quite reach.

Their footsteps descended through spiraling flights of stairs, the air thickening with each step. The walls soon gave way to a vast chasm, the earth splitting open to reveal a chamber bathed in blistering red and orange gradients. Heat pressed against their skin in suffocating waves. The ground trembled beneath them, a distant, rhythmic pulse, as if the facility itself had veins coursing with molten fire.

Scattered throughout the chamber, enormous platforms jutted out from the abyss, their foundations plunged deep into pools of roiling magma. The pillars groaned under unseen forces, shifting slightly, their precarious existence defying logic.

Misaki sighed, lifting a gloved hand to fan herself as drops of sweat glistened along her skin. With a huff, she reached for the zipper of her pink suit, dragging it down with deliberate slowness. The fabric peeled away from her shoulders, revealing the curve of her large sweat-slicked breasts beneath the thin shirt clinging to her like a near invisible sheath. She rolled her sleeves down, tying the loose upper half of her suit around her waist.

Mikoto froze.

Her gaze lingered—just a fraction too long—trailing the way the damp fabric clung, the sheen of sweat catching in the glow of the magma.

Misaki noticed.

Mikoto jolted upright, waving her hands in frantic denial. “I wasn’t—!”

She turned, arching a delicate brow as a coy smirk curled across her lips. “Oh my~,” she drawled, voice syrup-slow and dripping with mischief. “Even in the heat of battle, your thoughts are so… lurid Misaka-san~.” She lifted a gloved hand to her chest, feigning offense, though the amusement in her tone was impossible to miss.

Mikoto gulped. “Your gloves! That’s what I was—uh—admiring! They’re, um, very… black?”

Misaki took a step forward, closing the distance just enough to let her presence press against Mikoto’s senses. “Hm~,” she mused, lifting her black-gloved fingers and brushing them lightly against Mikoto’s cheek. “Admiring my gloves, were you?”

Misaki chuckled, her breath warm against Mikoto’s skin. She leaned in further, her lips just barely brushing past Mikoto’s ear. “If you win this one,” she whispered, voice velvet-soft yet laced with something wicked, “I’ll reward you handsomely, my prince~.”

Mikoto’s brain short-circuited.

“R-Right! Yep! Mhm! I’ll win! Me, Mikoto, I’ll definitely—uh—win!” she stammered, her voice climbing to a pitch of unearned confidence. She forced a laugh, planting her fists on her hips in a stance that only made her look more like an absolute idiot—a real, undeniable idiot.

Misaki merely giggled, stepping back with a satisfied flick of her hair, her knowing smirk lingering long after.

A faint blush crept across Mikoto’s cheeks as her eyes landed on her apple, covered in honey, sweet to the sight.

Misaki sighed, a laugh slipping past her lips as she glanced down at her hands. “You know, as unbearable as this heat is, it’s still nice to have gloves.”

“You’re practically naked without them,” Mikoto remarked, her tone light, innocent.

Misaki shot her a sidelong glance, lips quirking into something unreadable before she could respond.

Across the chasm, Kazari groaned, her voice ringing acute and shrill against the molten air. “Are you two quite done?” Her irritation cracked through the cavern like a whip. Then, under her breath, barely audible over the magma’s distant burbling—“Idiot dykes…”

Mikoto stiffened. The shift in atmosphere was instant, the weight of the moment pressing down on her chest. She turned to Misaki, who met her gaze with equal gravity.

“Here.” Mikoto handed her the hair pin her pocket, not sure she would have any use for it at this point.

“I’ll help however I can from here,” Misaki said, all traces of teasing gone.

Mikoto nodded, steeling herself before launching onto the first platform. The hexagonal tiles stretched across the volcanic abyss in a precarious pattern, separated only by centimeters. A bridge of uncertainty. Then—without warning—the platforms began to flicker, shifting through colors like a malfunctioning traffic signal. All except Kazari’s, which remained an ominous black.

Kazari spread her arms wide, her grin a wicked crescent. “The sixth game, my friends, is the Teetering Hexagon Mix-Up Heat!”

Mikoto deadpanned. “That sounds fucking stupid.”

Kazari merely shrugged, unimpressed. “I wasn’t aware railguns could fire before pulling the trigger.”

Mikoto stared at her.

“Projection. I’m saying you’re projecting.” Kazari attempted to explain, talking with her hands.

Mikoto scoffed, folding her arms. Then her gaze flitted down. Her brow creased. “Wait… is that a cape?”

Kazari, with deliberate flair, grasped the fabric and pulled it around herself in a theatrical sweep, her long, thick-gloved hands emphasizing the motion. “Indubitably so.”

Silence.

Then Mikoto burst out laughing. Holy shit, she was laughing—hard. Nearly doubling over.

Kazari’s brow twitched, her nostrils flaring. “Are you quite done?!”

Mikoto wheezed between chuckles. “Why the fuck are you wearing a cape?!”

Across the way, Misaki pressed a hand to her lips, her shoulders trembling before she fully lost composure, joining in the laughter.

Kazari flushed. Her grip on the fabric tightened. “I-It has utility!” she blurted, but the weak defense only sent both girls spiraling into harder laughter.

“Enough!” Kazari’s voice shattered the moment, her demented shriek echoing across the cavern. She stood heaving, red-faced, eyes ablaze with humiliated rage. Mikoto wiped tears from her eyes, still grinning.

But the absurdity of Kazari’s appearance wasn’t the only thing that made her laugh. It was everything—the stupid military blouse, the ridiculous knee-high combat boots, the matching gloves, the cape, and the goddamn Nazi-looking hat perched on her head like a final, tragic punchline.

“Seriously,” Mikoto snickered. “Did watching that Hollywood Street Fighter adaptation break you into psychosis? It wasn’t that bad.”

Kazari’s face contorted with fury. “The rules of the game are simple,” she seethed, raising her voice to drown out her own embarrassment. “All but one hexagon will collapse into the lava below. Last woman standing wins.”

Mikoto’s smirk faded.

She looked at Kazari—truly looked at her. Past the ridiculous outfit, past the bravado. And for the first time in this whole twisted game, she wondered if there was anything left of the girl she once knew.

“You’d go that far…”

Kazari’s breath was ragged, her chest rising and falling. She met Mikoto’s gaze with nothing but contempt. “This is what did it for you? You always were a brutish fucking moron.”

“My brutish moron!” Misaki called from the sidelines, waving with exaggerated cheer.

Mikoto felt heat rush to her face, fingers pulling at her collar as if that could dispel the sudden warmth blooming in her chest. She told herself it was just the magma, just the unbearable heat of the chamber. Not lava, right? They were still underground. Idiot wannabe dictator.

Her gaze snapped back to Kazari.

“Kazari,” she said, voice firm, forcing all distraction from her mind.

Kazari exhaled a low chuckle, tilting her head. Then—with a slow, deliberate roll of her neck—she popped it, the sudden cracks booming through the cavern’s heavy air.

“Ho?” she mused.

“This is your last chance,” Mikoto warned, clenching her fist, her body coiled like a wire pulled taut. “Surrender. I mean it.”

Kazari’s lips arched in disdain. “Your attitude is beginning to annoy me.”

She snapped her fingers.

From the shadows above, figures emerged. Thirty masked clones, their faces obscured by featureless white circles over black, crawled from unseen crevices in the upper cavern walls like demons answering their master’s call.

Mikoto’s eyes darted between them as they positioned themselves among the walls, moving in perfect synchronization, like a single body split into thirty identical forms. Her fingers twitched, instinct screaming at her to act—but before she could even flex a muscle, they leapt.

Her body moved before she could think. “No!” she shouted, stepping forward, hand outstretched to stop what was already irreversible.

One after another, they plunged into the magma, the glow of the molten rock swallowing them whole. The heat distorted the air, warping their silhouettes into ghostly afterimages before they vanished entirely.

The chamber reeked of burning flesh. The sound—thick, wet splashes followed by violent bursts of steam—sent a sharp sting through Mikoto’s gut. The clones did not scream, and somehow, that was infinitely worse.

Kazari tilted her head, lips prying into an amalgam of amusement and contempt.

“The more you piss me off,” she said, her voice slow, deliberate, cruel, “the more things like this will happen. Do you understand?”

Mikoto’s teeth clenched, the pressure grinding against her skull.

She needed to finish this quickly.

The dull ache in her chest sharpened, her breath pausing as hot sctratch spread through her throat. Shit. The taste of copper coated her tongue. She swallowed reflexively, but it didn’t stop the rising pressure—how long before her lungs began to fill? If the wounds had healed enough, that meant little. The internal damage could still be spreading as well. Her heart, her pancreas—had something else ruptured? Was she already—

A buzzer rang out, cutting through her spiraling thoughts like a serrated knife.

“Let the games begin,” Kazari announced, her voice carrying an unbearable smugness.

From the sidelines, Misaki’s arms wrapped around herself, her breath shallow as she watched the platforms begin their mechanical descent.The room rumbled, steel grinding against steel.

Mikoto’s guard is still down for Mental Out… The thought struck her all at once. If she focused—if she thought of something, anything—she could help her.

Then, faintly, she heard it.

A soft, rhythmic patter. The barely audible sound of blood dripping against metal—sizzling away upon contact.

Mikoto’s still bleeding…

The realization cinched around Misaki’s chest as if a hand had reached in and grabbed her heart. If she didn’t do something—if Mikoto didn’t do something—

Across the chasm, Kazari strolled lazily across her platform as if the chaos beneath her were nothing more than an amusing backdrop.

With a mechanical whir, twenty-nine of the thirty platforms continued their descent, their supports hissing as they sank toward the bubbling magma below.

Mikoto’s gaze flicked between the rapidly vanishing ground. Three to the left. She lunged, her body a blur of motion as she landed with a forceful thud.

Kazari did not rush.

She simply walked. A casual, almost playful hop carried her a full meter up, her boots landing soundlessly against the platform in front of Mikoto. They now stood a mere arm’s length apart, Kazari’s gaze unblinking, locked onto Mikoto with unsettling certainty.

Mikoto exhaled noisily, wiping her nose with the back of her thumb. Her stance lowered, tension voluting through her muscles. “Momentum, huh,” she muttered, one eye squeezing shut for a brief second.

Kazari turned her back to her.

“Don’t believe everything your busy bee says,” she mused, her voice dripping with arrogance.

She knew Mikoto wouldn’t strike her while her back was turned.

But did it even matter?

The platforms lurched upward with a grinding metallic groan, their surfaces still coated in magma. The molten rock clung to some like molten gold, dripping in slow, viscous globs before seeming to hardening into jagged crusts. The air shimmered from the heat, and Mikoto instinctively hesitated, her muscles tensed, her weight balanced at the very edge of safety. The glow beneath her cast long, wavering shadows, as though the arena itself were alive and shifting.

Kazari, however, moved without a second thought.

Her boots pressed against the blistering metal, yet not once did she flinch. Every step left behind a perfect, cooled imprint—a stark contrast against the glowing red steel. It was as though she were walking across a light dusting of red snow, her presence rewriting the very laws of nature. Well, everyone’s AIM fields did that.

A shiver crept down Mikoto’s spine, slow and insidious, though it had nothing to do with the heat wafting from below. The game was rigged—this arena was Kazari’s grand stage, the script written in her favor, each line meticulously rehearsed. Mikoto was merely an actor forced into the role of a tragic heroine, meant to falter at the climax.

As the platforms steadied themselves, Kazari continued her erratic promenade, weaving an absentminded path across the burning lattice. The way she moved—deliberate yet carefree, utterly unbothered by the molten abyss yawning beneath her feet—unsettled Mikoto more than she cared to admit. The sheer ease with which Kazari ignored the danger while she herself struggled to breathe past the thick, auriferous air made her stomach contract with frustration. She was waiting. Waiting for Mikoto to slip, to hesitate, to waste her precious moments thinking instead of acting.

Mikoto shifted her weight, shoes pressing against the tungsten surface. Or was it tungsten? The sensation was strange—her soles didn’t just press against the metal; they clung. A heartbeat later, she felt the uncomfortable pull, the suggestion of melting.

Her pulse quickened. Think, Mikoto. Think.

The magnetocaloric effect? No. She discarded it almost immediately. Changing the electromagnetic fields could, in theory, manipulate the temperature, slow the transfer of heat—but this wasn’t a controlled environment. If Kazari anticipated it, she could counter it. In fact, Mikoto suspected the material had been chosen for that very reason. Was the tungsten selected to withstand the magma? Or to withstand her?

Her fingers twitched with indecision. Could she dissipate the heat with a thermoelectric pulse? She might be able to shunt some of the excess energy away, redirecting it elsewhere, but would it be fast enough? What about arcing discharges? Ionizing the air, creating a volatile cushion—but that was risky. One misstep and she’d ignite the very air around her

She exhaled, dragging a hand through her hair before her mind wandered to the small bunny patch sewn onto her now destroyed jacket. Lightning hop? Jumping from arc to arc, avoiding the platforms entirely? No—her body was already battered. The strain on her injuries would be unbearable.

Then, a voice—soft yet intrusive, curling around her mind like the sigh of satin.

“Levitate.”

Mikoto flinched. Misaki.

“You didn't put the barrier back up.”

For a second, Mikoto considered recoiling from the foreign presence in her head, but she didn't. Because Misaki was right.

Levitation. Not just aimless floating—controlled, measured electromagnetic suspension. If she manipulated the Lorentz forces properly, she could create a maglev effect, keeping herself millimeters above the surface—enough to prevent direct conduction, but not enough to avoid the searing heat entirely. Then again, if she juiced it enough, it would be centimeters. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would buy her time.

She didn’t hesitate any longer.

Kazari was already twenty hexagons away, standing at the highest point with her arms crossed, her back still turned, her body language that of a queen awaiting a kneeling subject.

“Try me.”Mikoto glowered.

Worst case scenario, if she felt too fatigued after awhile, she could negatively charge her shoes and the platforms to create a repelling effect with minimal energy expenditure.

A sharp crack echoed as Mikoto unleashed a magnetic field beneath her feet, the charge surging downward like an unseen tide. The platform screamed in resistance, repelling her body with a violent jolt—her muscles tensed as she hovered, centimeters above the blistering surface. Blue-white sparks flickered around her, tracing the lines of invisible forces keeping her aloft, an ephemeral corona of electricity.The moment her soles made contact, heat rushed through the rubber, the tungsten still sizzling from its brief dip in magma. Mikoto gritted her teeth. No good—she needed to break contact. Electricity buzzed through her legs as she pulsed a strong magnetic field downward.

Kazari glanced over her shoulder, an almost feline amusement dancing in her eyes. “Oh? Floating now?”

“Just making sure I don't melt my sneakers,” Mikoto shot back, popping her knuckles, though her voice betrayed the exhaustion creeping into her limbs.

Then, with a flick of her heel, she shifted the currents, repelling herself forward in a blur of movement. The world became a streak of liquefied red and blinding blue, the platforms beneath her little more than moving points of reference as she tore through the air.Frictionless. Unstoppable.

The moment her feet touched the elevated hexagon, it was already two meters above the rest. The air was thinner here, cooler. A pocket of tension coiled between them.

Kazari still didn’t turn fully, merely tilting her head. “Well done, Biribiri.”

Mikoto’s eyes darkened. “You too with that, huh?” The electricity crackling under her feet hissed, snapping erratically against the tungsten, eager to bite.

Kazari’s smirk deepened. “You’ve adapted well—let’s hope it lasts.”

Her voice carried something something sinister, a creeping, syrupy malice that wrapped around the edges of her words. And then—a flick of her tongue over her lips.

Mikoto swallowed. Static discharges sputtering beneath her like blue fireflies. The heat between them had nothing to do with the magma below.

The platforms rose once more from their molten graveyard, but this time they did not linger at their apex. They fell. Faster than before, as though yanked downward by invisible hands, swallowed back into the lake of fire almost as quickly as they emerged.

Mikoto’s eyes darted to Kazari—she wasn’t waiting. She was already moving, gliding effortlessly across the crumbling battlefield, her footfalls light as air, weaving across the descending hexagons in a rhythmic dance. It was almost hypnotic—the way she moved, like she had done this a thousand times before. Had she?

Mikoto swallowed her hesitation and pushed off into a sprint, her body a blur of motion as she bounded from one fleeting foothold to the next. The platforms weren’t just unstable—they were traitorous, waiting for a moment’s hesitation to send her plummeting into the perfervidly burning hell below.

She couldn’t afford to hesitate.

“I'm surprised you haven’t attempted to knock me off yet,” Kazari mused, her voice carrying effortlessly across the heated air. Still, she didn’t turn around. “That old Tokiwadai sentimentality holding you back, ace?”

Mikoto grimaced. It wasn’t just sentimentality—it was doubt.

She had been avoiding the ardent truth hanging between them. Would she have to kill her?Could she?

There was no way she could outmaneuver Kazari at her own game. She moved with the ease of a predator in its natural habitat, never missing a beat, every motion practiced to perfection. Once again the thought echoed across Mikoto’s mind: How many times had she done this? How many had she lured into this death trap, only to let them plummet while she watched from above?

If Misaki could just break into her mind, scrape away the layers of whatever madness had taken hold, then maybe—just maybe—they wouldn’t have to finish this in blood. If Mikoto could just knock her out…

“She’s disrupting the moisture in the air. There’s no path. It’s weird too… it’s like the energy in the air just disappears, as if frozen in place or something.” Misaki’s voice threaded into her thoughts, tinged with unease.

Mikoto bit her lip. That wasn’t normal.

“Does she have free reign over temperature as a dimension?” she thought, barely dodging a collapsing platform beneath her feet.

“I think that’s the bare minimum,” Misaki murmured, a slow realization creeping into the flow of her thoughts. “Entropy maybe?” Misaki placed a hand on her chin as she sat crisscrossed, watching.

Mikoto’s stomach twisted. That was worse. So much worse.

She had been in battles that defied reason before. She had fought monsters who could shatter physics with a whim. But controlling entropy? That wasn’t just altering heat or energy. That was warping the fundamental flow of existence itself.

“This… might be even worse than going up against Accelerator…” Mikoto admitted, a cold sweat forming at her back as her foot slipped against the edge of a tilting hexagon.

Kazari snapped her fingers.

The air trembled.

And suddenly—the platforms swayed beneath them.

Mikoto’s stomach lurched as the once-unsteady footholds became traitorous waves of steel, shifting unpredictably, writhing under an unseen force like leaves caught in a violent gale.

“Better really watch your step now,” Kazari purred, her laughter rich with sadistic amusement.

Mikoto dug her heels in, recalibrating her trajectory even as the ground beneath conspired against her. She wasn’t going to win this by playing fair.

“You know,” she called out, her voice steady despite the precarious dance of death, “maybe it’s you that’s feeling sentimental.”

Kazari’s pace didn’t falter, though she tilted her head ever so slightly. “Mmm~?”

“You haven’t exactly knocked me off yet.”

A wry smirk faded at Mikoto’s lips. She was onto something.

Kazari could have ended this already. She had the control, the terrain, the power. So why was she drawing it out?

For the first time, Mikoto matched her pace. The two of them moved in tandem—one just ahead of the other, mirroring each other's movements in a synchronized spectacle of motion.

Kazari still didn’t turn around tolook at her. Instead, she folded her arms, matching Mikoto’s speed with disturbing ease to look upon her from the front as she fell back from her position.

“Truth be told,” she enunciated, “I don’t think you’re worth the exertion, you cockroach-haired freak.”

Mikoto almost stumbled.

Cockroach-haired?

That was new. It wasn’t just an insult—it was a weird insult. Was that really the best she had?

But before Mikoto could process the absurdity of it, the platform beneath her wobbled violently—then collapsed.

She felt the ground betray her. The plummet was instant, gravity snapping at her heels.

But instinct won over.

With a burst of electromagnetic force, she propelled herself forward, launching across the torrid abyss in a violent arc, her body buzzing with ionized air as she barely made it to the next platform. Her landing was sloppy—a skid of rubber and steel, her shoulder scraping against the heated surface.

Kazari was already there.

Waiting.

She hadn’t moved. Hadn’t even flinched.

Mikoto’s breath came heavier now, sweat slicking her arms, her pulse hammering in her ears.

“Well done,” Kazari said with a clap of her hands, appearing beside her as if she had simply blinked into existence. The heat around them thickened, pressing against Mikoto’s skin like a leaden weight.

Kazari tilted her head, her smirk deepening. “I wonder how long you can keep it up with your injuries~?”

Mikoto wiped her brow, and smirked in return. “As long as I can still draw breath.”

Kazari’s eyes widened slightly before narrowing into a frown. “Ironic,” she murmured, almost as if speaking to herself.

There was no time to process it. The battlefield was collapsing beneath them, the platforms tilting, breaking, crashing into one another in a clamor of metal and impassioned fury. The gaps between them grew wider, and it made Mikoto’s stomach lurch.

Still, neither stopped. They couldn’t.

Mikoto’s shoes pounded against the shifting surfaces, her breath coming in succinct bursts, sweat stinging her eyes as she pushed forward. But Kazari—Kazari was relentless. Her movements were fluid, effortless, a blur of precision that seemed almost detached from the chaotic destruction surrounding them.

She landed gracefully on a new platform, pivoting with ease, and—before Mikoto could react—she was there, face to face with her.

Mikoto recoiled, a fresh wave of heat rolling off her skin, her pulse pounding against her throat.

“Do you know how long I've hated you?” Kazari asked, her breath cool against Mikoto’s sweat-slicked skin.

Mikoto barely had time to blink before the words hit her. Hate?

“Enlighten me,” she spat, forcing her expression into something resembling defiance.

Kazari’s lips curled upward, but it wasn’t a smile. It was raw. Unfiltered. A wound left festering for years.

“Since the day I fucking met your ass,” she hissed, her voice laced with spite. There was an unhinged lilt to it—anger restrained, but only just. “So arrogant, so full of yourself. Because you were born lucky.”

Mikoto’s nose wrinkled. “I worked—”

The slap came fast. A sudden, brutal snap of impact that rang in her skull, jerking her head to the side.

Misaki winced as she watched, compressing her fists into little balls of anger. How dare she.

“Work means nothing without the requisite parameters,” Kazari snapped, her left eye twitching. There was something feverish in her stare now, something falling apart. “I’ll admit, I was confused about how I felt. Sometimes I even thought you were my friend. Stupid, isn’t it? I stuck my neck out for you, more than once. But no matter what, you were always just a jumped-up ape.”

The word hung between them, sharp as a brand new kitchen knife.

Kazari’s gaze never left her, even as they sprinted across the platforms, the battlefield steadily crumbling around them. They were moving in sync, feet striking metal in unison, but there was no harmony here—only tension stretched so tight it threatened to snap at any moment.

“If I hadn’t been so weak—so pathetic—back then, I wouldn’t have hesitated,” Kazari continued, her voice an eerie mix of bitterness and conviction.

Mikoto felt her gutssquirm. How long had this resentment been building?

Kazari bunched her fists, something almost like excitement flickering in her eyes.

“Ever since I got ahold of the Universe Projector,” she said, voice dropping into something lower, heavier. Something decadent.

Mikoto’s steps faltered. What?

“You what?” she breathed, her mind struggling to process the words.

“The power of God,” Kazari said, her pupils dilating. “Manifested from the potential to the real. The imagination of the ability user, made tangible through their AIM fields. The opposite of how your girlfriend’s boyfriend’s Imagine Breaker worked before it was ripped away from—”

Kazarilicked her lips. “That’s what Aihana Etsu is, after all.”

Mikoto shuddered. Was she saying Aihana Etsu was a thing rather than a person?

“Was never a thing!” Misaki’s voice suddenly cut in, referring to Touma rather than Etsu, sharp and panicked, desperate to sever the tension hanging between them.

But Kazari wasn’t listening.

She moved.

Faster than Mikoto could react, her fingers closed around her throat.

Mikoto’s body seized. Shit.

“Regardless,” Kazari hissed. “I’ve wanted to kill you ever since.”

She gasped as Kazari’s grip tightened, the pressure clamping down like an iron vice. Her pulse slamming against her skull, her vision already blurring at the edges as she struggled to draw in air.

“A kitten is quite timid and nice, usually,” Kazari whispered into Mikoto’s ear, voice light—mocking. “But what happens when it grows up? Do cats not torture their food? If your cat was a lion, would it not eat you—regardless of all the love and affection you gave it?”

Her fingers dug in deeper.

Mikoto wheezed, her chest burning.

“Stop it!” Misaki’s voice cracked. She had stood up. Her usual calculated control was gone—her voice was shaking. Her eyes shimmered, glassy with unshed tears.

Kazari ignored her.

“It’s such a shame you’re not a challenge at all,” she sighed, tilting her head. “Oh, how the tables have turned. Now you know how it feels… to be helpless.”

Mikoto’s mind was screaming. She was running out of time.

Desperation surged through her veins. Electricity—she had to use her electricity. Now.

With every ounce of strength left in her body, she sent a violent pulse of current straight to Kazari’s hand.

Nothing.

The energy was siphoned away in an instant. It was useless.

Kazari huffed out a soft, breathy laugh.

“I’ll dip you in the lava personally,” she whispered. “I’ll make sure the platform descends slowly, so your fucktoy of a slut can watch in agony.”

That one pissed Mikoto off.

The clamp around her neck was absolute. The heat in her blood was gone. She couldn’t breathe—couldn’t move.

Think. There’s always an out.

Electricity flickered around her skin, but she couldn’t feel it. Her nerves—frozen. She couldn’t generate heat. Her body was shutting down.

But she didn’t need to move.

She forced herself to focus.

With one last, desperate thought, Mikoto reached beyond instinct, beyond logic, beyond even the last shreds of certainty she clung to. Polarity? No. Not just that. She let go.

Of her charge. Of the forces that bound her in place. Of her own electrons.

For an infinitesimal moment—a fraction of a fraction of time—there was nothing. No sensation, no weight, no resistance. The universe around her twisted, unfixed and uncertain, her very presence an anomaly flickering at the edge of existence.

A flash. A distortion.

And then—she fell.

Right through Uiharu Kazari’s fingers.

Kazari’s grip, once so absolute, so suffocating, clutched at empty space.

Uiharu blinked, her expression unreadable—not in disbelief, but in the quiet, creeping horror of something she could not comprehend. “What…?”

Mikoto hit the ground hard, the impact jolting through her bones. She staggered, her legs barely catching her weight as sensation flooded back in an overwhelming rush.

Her breath hitched. Everything felt wrong.

Her body, her skin, the very air around her—alien. It was like she had passed through some intangible barrier, slipped through the cracks of reality, and now, laying here, she wasn't quite sure if she had come back the same.

She lifted a trembling hand to her throat, rubbing the tender, bruised flesh where Kazari’s fingers had been. Heat rushed over her nerves and they pinched. The pain was grounding—too real—for a moment until Misaki took it away. “It’s magma, you piece of shit.” Mikoto managed to say as she coughed and wheezed.

Kazari’s scowl deepened. “How did you do that?”

Mikoto forced herself to straighten, her muscles still sluggish, her breath uneven. She needed to stay focused.

“When objects interact—when they touch each other,” she began, her voice hoarse, “it’s because the electrons in their atoms repel one another.” She swallowed, the taste of copper still lingering in her mouth. “Ever heard of quantum tunneling, Uiharu?”

She met Kazari’s gaze then, her expression unreadable.

The platform beneath them lurched, descending ever closer to the churning molten chasm.

Kazari flexed her fingers, staring at her own palm as if it no longer belonged to her. “You shifted phases,” she mumbled, almost to herself. Her brows furrowed, her grip tightening into a fist. “You passed through my grasp… like a ghost.”

Something roared in her eyes—a realization, a crack in certainty.

“Manipulating quantum electrodynamics in such a way…” She exhaled slowly, tilting her head as if considering. “That seems a little… above your pay grade.”

Mikoto let out a breath—not a laugh, not relief, but something caught between exhaustion and quiet defiance.

“Yeah, well,” she muttered, feeling the oppressive heat pressing against her skin. “I'm full of surprises.”

And with that, she launched off the platform, pushing past the vertigo clawing at her senses, landing on another one—one still standing, still stable. Her throat vibrated still from where Kazari had grabbed her, causing Mikoto to rub the area.

Misaki, from her precarious perch, wiped sweat from her neck. Her relief was palpable, even from a distance. “That’s my girl!” she called, lifting an arm in weak celebration.

But it wasn’t over.

The moment Mikoto caught her breath, Kazari was already moving.

She surfed through the air with eerie grace, a reaper against the burning sky, landing lightly in front of Mikoto.

“That won’t work a second time,” she said, her voice as calm as it was absolute.

Mikoto barely had time to register the words before it hit her—the nausea, the exhaustion, the weight pressing down on her thoughts.

Her vision blurred. Her limbs felt wrong. Sluggish. Her heartbeat—slowing.

Her body was shutting down.

No. No, not yet.

A final act of resistance.

Her body screamed, her nerves burned despite Misaki’s input, her mind clouded with the suffocating pressure of exhaustion. Every breath was a battle, every moment stolen against the inevitability of collapse. But Mikoto refused to fall—not yet, not before she had taken something, anything, away from the monster standing before her.

She summoned the last embers of her power, but not as an attack—not as a weapon hurled toward her enemy, but as something far more desperate, more reckless.

The charge didn’t flow outward—it enveloped.

Lightning surged, not as a bolt, not as a railgun shot, but as a storm, raw and untamed, swallowing the space around them. The air split apart, tearing at itself with an unnatural screech as arcs of electricity raced between atoms, shredding the fabric of order itself.

And then—the cold stopped.

Uiharu’s eyes, once so calm, so utterly composed in their omnipotence, widened just slightly. “What now—?” The word was more breath than sound.

Mikoto twisted free. The moment her feet hit the platform, her knees nearly gave out beneath her. Every part of her body rebelled, her muscles tight with overexertion, her lungs burning as though she had inhaled fire. But she gritted her teeth and bore it.

“Try cooling something that can’t conduct heat,” she rasped, forcing herself upright.

A glint of something passed across Uiharu’s face—not fear, but recognition. A realization that, just for a second, something had slipped beyond her control.

And that was all the opening Misaki needed.

For a brief instant, Kazari hesitated, her consciousness unsteady under the invasive grip of Misaki’s ability. Her expression twitched—a single moment of vacuous vacant stillness—before she snapped back, the momentary lapse vanishing into the volcano.

But a moment was all Mikoto needed.

She threw everything she had—10 billion volts, the sum of her very existence, a force of sheer munificence extirpated at Kazari with reckless abandon.

The storm of power burst forth, a searing column of raw electricity ripping through the air, its terrible radiance an unrelenting pillar of white-hot fury splitting the vault of heaven—blotting out the world in a symphony of crackling ozone and blistering heat. The light so blinding that even Misaki, far away as she was, had to avert her gaze lest she be swallowed whole by its radiance. And yet, when the torrent finally ceased, the aftermath was not one of triumph but of horror.

Then—silence.

Kazari still stood.

Smoke curled from her ruined attire, the remnants of her once-pristine hat fluttering away in blackened tatters. Her flesh bore the cruel signatures of Misaka’s rage—scorched, split, the acrid stench of burnt hair and flesh wafting into the air like incense offered to some dreadful deity. Her locks, once neat, had become a tangle of charred strands, small embers still licking hungrily at their ends.

And yet she merely dusted herself off.

“Not bad,” she mused, her voice a lazy drawl, as though discussing a change in weather rather than a direct strike from a billion volts of electric fury. “Didn’t see that one coming.”

Mikoto staggered, her breath a ragged gasp. Impossible. This wasn’t real. It couldn’t be real. Her vision swam, pulse beating wildly as her body refused to comprehend what her eyes so plainly saw. Kazari’s footsteps were slow, deliberate, and with every measured step forward, the flames entwined in her hair burned with a sinister vitality, coiling like demonic serpents around her scalp.

“I’ll repay you in spades,” she said devilishly, closing the distance, her fingers wrapping around Mikoto’s throat with a crushing force.

Mikoto gagged, instinctively clawing at Kazari’s wrist, but her strength was nothing in the face of this monster. Her feet left the ground, the weight of her own body nothing to Kazari as she dangled in the air, gasping for a breath that would never come.

“That uncreative?” she choked, a smirk struggling across her lips despite the torment.

Kazari’s grip tightened.

And then the world shuddered. But Mikoto had one more ace up her sleeve.

“You’re already dead,” Uiharu whispered, her voice as hollow as the metaphoric grave she dug for Mikoto.

In an instant, the warmth was gone. A silence more profound than death itself stretched across the battlefield as the air turned to ice, the space between them plummeting past the threshold of comprehension. Mikoto's body betrayed her—her lungs locked, Misaki’s block on her pain vanished entirely for a moment, every fiber of her being frozen in the absolute nothingness that seeped into her bones.

So I’ll just make you forget how to kill me.

The thought was not spoken, nor screamed—her final spark wasn’t so much as a shock. It was a whisper—an invisible burst of electromagnetic noise, a pulse shaped like a command—willed into existence, an unseen pulse of electromagnetic noise puncturing through the void like a silent requiem.

Uiharu’s fingers twitched. Her pupils contracted. Her breath hitched on the cusp of realization—then failed entirely.

“Hh—” The sound barely escaped her throat before her muscles locked, her grip failing.

For just a moment, a single second that stretched into infinity, Mikoto was free.

She collapsed, hacking, grasping at her throat as oxygen clawed its way back into her lungs. It was a gamble. A desperate, foolish gamble. Uiharu’s power adapted—it always adapted. It would recover in an instant, recalibrating the impossible, stitching together its own godlike logic before Mikoto could even hope to move again.

Mikoto had wrenched the strings of Uiharu’s mind, plucking at them with an unseen hand, sending a discordant note through the fabric of her nervous system. For just a breath, a flicker of a moment, the girl's entropic dominion faltered—stumbled in its ceaseless adaptation. The automatic process that governed her power, cold and mechanical, did not possess the intuition to contend with the erratic nature of Mikoto’s assault.

Electricity, the very note of the universe’s primordial language, had slipped through the cracks of logic and reason, lodging itself in the heart of Uiharu’s brain. A single, calculated pulse, devoid of grandeur, without force or spectacle. Mikoto had scrambled her brain’s signals for just a second. It seems like Uiharu's entropic control was something that adapted. Yeah. The automatic process didn't have the knowledge or know how to deal with an electromagnetic pulse, specifically with temporal distortions pinpointed directly at her cerebrum. In essence, she gambled on Uiharu being unable to assess the randomness of Mikoto's attack automatically, wrongly gauging which part of the EMP would affect her. Just a whisper—yet it sent Uiharu’s body reeling, muscles betraying her, the delicate machinery of her own mind turning against her in seizure. But it wouldn’t last. This was no victory, merely a delay. The stillness would pass, the gears would grind forward once more, and then—the inevitable would come.

“I’m starting to get pissed off,” Kazari groaned, shaking her head as if brushing off a trifling inconvenience. “You’re like a little dog, nipping at its master.”

Mikoto's chest heaved as she forced herself to stay upright. Her legs trembled, but she could not afford weakness. She dragged her gaze across the battlefield—seven platforms remained, suspended in a void that stretched on endlessly, untouched by gravity, untouched by mercy. None had descended. No salvation would come from the heavens.

Kazari exhaled, and the world turned to frost.

“If I willed it,” she said, her voice heavy with amusement, “all motion would cease. Every molecule would slow to stillness, every reaction would halt, and you—” she tilted her head, smiling as every molecule around them slowed down, erasing the heat around them “—you would end in silence.”

A screaming howl of freezing wind burst forth like a spirit being ripped from its body, and the air itself seemed to shatter into stagnation. Heat, the pulse of existence, was ripped from the world. The first fingers of frost reached Mikoto’s skin, sinking into her bones like an encroaching death knell.

Pain flared in her lungs. Each breath was agony, as if she were inhaling metal all over, as if something inside her had ruptured and was spilling liquefied iron down her throat. Blood. She could taste it now, rich and bitter, collecting behind her lips. How long had she been bleeding like this? How much longer could she endure?

Misaki tried to cut off the pain in a sweat, but there was nothing she could do.

And then there was Uiharu.

Untouched. Untainted. A figure wreathed in flames, yet unburned—an angel of entropy, serene as divinity itself. The space around her twisted in slow, delicate undulations, as though the universe itself bowed to her presence. It did.

Entropy—the silent erosion of all things.

Mikoto clenched her teeth. It didn’t matter what she did. A railgun would be stripped of its heat before the bullet ever fired. A desperate strike would die in the air, her muscles robbed of kinetic force before movement could even begin. Against an adversary who dictated the decay of reality itself, effort was another word for futility.

Unless—

A thought struck her, wild and reckless.

If Uiharu could command entropy, then Mikoto would give her something beyond command. Something that could not be processed, nor reasoned with.

Something that would make Maxwell’s Demon blush.

The air thickened, heavy with unseen force. Electricity licked at Mikoto’s skin, not in streams, not in bolts, but in twisting, living fractals. The arcs did not follow the laws of nature. They bent where they should not. They curved, spiraled inward upon themselves, folding into something dense, something wrong like a collapsed star. A hum resonated through the space—not a sound, not a vibration, but the very fabric of space protesting against the abomination taking shape. The air itself vibrated—the very atoms struggling to maintain form, losing their sense of order.

Uiharu stiffened.

Her lips parted, her pupils constricting in quiet horror.

“W-what are you doing?”

The first step backward. The first sign of doubt.

Mikoto smiled. A ragged, bloody grin. “Making a mess.”

And the world exploded in a shatter.

Not in flame. Not in force. But in disorder—a singularity of chaos, pure and unrelenting. Not heat, not pressure, not force, but something beyond all of them. A force that had no pattern, no structure to grasp.

Uiharu reached out instinctively, but there was nothing to seize, no threads to untangle, no logic to wield. Her power recoiled.

Mikoto staggered forward, coughing, her ribs screeching in torment. The wound in her side pulsed—hot, wet, searing—but she ignored it. She had seconds.

This was a little something Mikoto liked to call a thermodynamic singularity. She forced an energy injection so intense that it created a runaway feedback loop of disorder, making Kazari's own power to process or stabilize her environment destroy itself.

The second her control slipped, Mikoto moved, blood spilling from her mouth.

A razor-sharp thought pulsed through Misaki’s mind.

“Now.”

Without hesitation, she stabbed Kazari’s hair pin across her palm, her own blood mixing with Mikoto’s still-warm droplets.

A whisper of power. A birth of frost.

Ice blossomed, a barrage of jagged, crystalline shards ripping through the air. The frozen lances shot toward Kazari, most vanishing into vapor, undone by entropy before they could strike. But one—just one—held form.

And it struck true.

A perfect spear of ice, driven into Kazari’s chest.

She staggered. She slipped. And then she fell.

Mikoto wheezed, her breath rattling in her chest, as she watched Kazari’s form plummet from the platform, swallowed by the magma below. The world around her blurred, edges bleeding together into a watercolor smear of dim light and shadow, as if she were drowning in the depths of the ocean. Her head pounded, and the very room itself seemed to sway—a cruel trick of her exhausted senses, or perhaps reality itself, bending in the aftermath of entropy’s dissolution.

Misaki’s heart raced. She redirected the ice toward the gap between them. She created a perpetually rebuilding ice bridge as it melted. The strain was intolerable. It made Misaki feel like her stomach was going to rise out and burst through her chest. But eventually, after a minute, Mikoto made it, collapsing right next to her.

A warmth pressed against her. A presence—steady, grounding.

“Hey,” Misaki murmured, her voice unusually soft as she cradled her. “Stay with me, Miko…”

She gently elevated her head, fingers brushing against sweat-dampened skin. Mikoto’s pulse stuttered beneath her touch—too weak, too shallow. Each breath was a struggle, a flutter of air barely filling lungs that had worked too hard for too long.

A rustle in the distance. A shift in the air.

Index stirred, blinking groggily into wakefulness, her silver-white hair glimmering in the soft light. She seemed unharmed, though her expression tensed the moment she regained awareness. Before she could even comprehend the situation, Misaki had reached into her mind, bending her will without ceremony.

Move.

Index obeyed. She launched forward, a blur of urgency, closing the distance between them in a minute flat.

And in that moment—just as Misaki reached into Index’s mind—she felt another presence. A susurration at the edge of her perception.

Junko.

Her mind hovered outside the facility, close yet infuriatingly distant. Of course, the rescue team would arrive late. Misaki nearly laughed—how utterly predictable. How painfully, fucking typical.

But there was no time for frustration.

Index dropped to her knees beside Mikoto’s trembling body, not wasting a single second. She raised her hands, summoning the last vestiges of her magic. A brilliant blue glow erupted from her fingertips, circling them in delicate, interwoven sigils. The magic expanded, enveloping them both in radiant light.

Mikoto’s body heaved, a violent spasm wracking her frame. She coughed, a wet, raw sound, her throat convulsing against the metallic tang of blood. Her fingers draped against Misaki’s arm, gripping weakly as her body fought against the shock trying to drag her under.

Then—the spell wavered.

The intricate circle of light crackled, faltered. A surge of raw energy burst outward, swirling wildly before dissipating into the air. The spell shattered.

Index collapsed into Mikoto’s lap. Misaki almost felt bad about using her like that, but Mikoto was on death’s doorstep.

She slumped forward, gasping, her body trembling from the exertion. The bright starry glow in her eyes dimmed, fading like the last embers of a dying fire. Misaki let go of her mind, relinquishing control, and watched as Index’s awareness sluggishly returned.

“What…!? Huh!?” Index blinked rapidly, disoriented, her breath uneven. Her gaze darted around the cavernous space, only half-aware of what had transpired.

Misaki bowed her head slightly. “Sorry. I had to.”

Index was about to say something. It didn’t look nice, but she slumped back against the cave wall, her body succumbing to exhaustion instead. Misaki let out a quiet sigh. Her knee had nearly healed—almost as if nothing had happened at all—but the phantom pain still lingered, a dull reminder that some wounds, even when mended, never truly vanished.

Beside her, Mikoto stirred, the soft rustling of fabric the only sound in the cavern’s silence. Her lashes fluttered as she opened her eyes, their brown depths clouded with fatigue, a quiet vulnerability peeking through the cracks of her usual resilience. She cleared her throat, but the action was weak, the sound barely carrying past the space between them. A meager sound one might expect of say, a kitten, Misaki thought.

Misaki hesitated for a fraction of a second before lifting a hand, her fingers grazing Mikoto’s cheek. She half-expected her to flinch away, but she didn’t. Instead, Mikoto leaned ever so slightly into the touch.

“How are you feeling?” Misaki asked, her voice softer than a cashmere sweater.

Mikoto exhaled, her breath shallow but steady. “I think… I think the serious stuff is gone, but not everything.” Her voice was low, roughened by strain, sounding fragile. “I still feel pretty tired.”

Misaki gave a small, tired smile. “Yeah,” she murmured, still staring into her eyes, as if trying to read something deeper within them.

For a fleeting moment, the exhaustion between them softened.

“Did… did I get her?” Mikoto asked at last, forcing herself upright. She flinched winced but managed to lean back against the wall next to Index, who remained blissfully unconscious.

Misaki nodded, shifting to sit beside her, their shoulders brushing. Mikoto let out a slow breath before tilting her head, resting it lightly against Misaki’s shoulder.

Misaki stilled.

She could feel the warmth of her—warm despite the blood loss, warm despite the hell they had just endured—warm despite everything.

Mikoto let her eyes close.

“A feedback loop, huh?” Misaki murmured after a moment, resting her chin lightly atop Mikoto’s head, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “That was pretty clever.”

“I figured it had about a 50/50 chance of working,” Mikoto sighed, the hint of a smile tugging at her lips.

“Somehow, I’m surprised anything worked,” Misaki admitted, a soft laugh escaping her lips.

“It shouldn’t have,” Mikoto replied, her voice growing drowsy. “She wasn’t used to her ability at that level.”

“That, and she played with her food too much,” Misaki said, the amusement in her tone faint, but present.

“If she was actually as smart as she said she was, she should’ve eaten me in one bite,” Mikoto added, giving a weak chuckle.

Misaki smirked, shifting just slightly so that her lips brushed against the crown of Mikoto’s head. “Well, I’d prefer to savor you too~,” she whispered, pressing a delicate kiss to her hair.

Mikoto inhaled.

It was subtle—barely more than a pause in her breath—but Misaki felt it.

The electricity between them wasn’t literal this time, yet it hummed in the air all the same. A silent tension, heavy and awkward, like a red string pulled taut between them, but incapable of ever being broken.

Mikoto didn’t pull away.

Instead, she let out a shaky exhale, almost imperceptible. “What a scary ability, though,” she whispered, her voice suddenly quieter, strained in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion.

Misaki, sensing the shift, let the moment pass.

“If there was ever a Level 6 candidate…”

“Mmm.” Misaki hummed, though her mind lingered elsewhere. “She could have scrambled the entire room in the blink of an eye. As if someone took a cake and just tore it to pieces and threw it to the mud.”

Mikoto groaned, rubbing at her face. “Cake sounds pretty good right about now,” she muttered, licking her bottom lip—still tasting the faint tang of blood.

Misaki watched the motion. Her lips parted slightly, but she didn’t say what she was thinking.

Instead, Mikoto let out a short breath of amusement. “I bet those freaks in the VIP section are enjoying as much.” She opened her eyes again, blinking the drowsiness away.

“Then what do you say we go pay them a little visit?” Misaki suggested, tilting her head.

Mikoto met her eyes, searching for something within them.

Then, she nodded.

Misaki reached out, offering her hand. Mikoto took it.

Even through the gloves, she could feel the warmth of Misaki’s skin.