MikoMisa Games

As Misaki and Mikoto rounded the corner, the air hung thick with the scent of spent gunpowder and the electric residue of battle. Shadows strobed against the shattered walls, cast by the flashing muzzle fire within the ruined VIP lounge. Chaos reigned—a dissonance of barked orders, desperate screams, and the sharp, staccato rhythm of bullets carving through the remnants of luxury, now reduced to a war zone.

Mikoto raised an eyebrow, her expression a mix of intrigue and exhaustion, quickening her pace instinctively.

“It’s Hokaze and the band she put together,” Misaki noted with an effortless, knowing smile.

“Ah...” Mikoto sighed, slowing down just before stepping into the frame of the door.

“Put your goddamn hands up!” came a voice, sharp and severe—Shirai Kuroko, authoritative yet tinged more personal, more unsteady.

“Make another move, and you're toast, got it, buddy?” The insufferable voice of Kamijou Touma cut in, layered with the usual male bravado that made Mikoto's skin prickle.

“Watch it!” Hokaze Junko shouted, her voice cutting through the discord.

Inside, the chaos congealed into something tangible—a tableau of both ruin and victory. Himegami Aisa, Fukiyose Seiri, Kuroko, Junko, and Touma stood triumphant amidst the wreckage. And at their feet, handcuffed and splayed out like a sacrificial offering to their triumph, lay that irredeemable degenerate, Aogami Pierce. Mikoto's lip curled in disgust.

Gods, she should have ended him years ago. Piece of shit.

Without hesitation, she stepped over his head, pressing the edge of her melted heel into his back with deliberate weight before striding toward the group.

Kuroko flinched, her fingers grazing the grip of her firearm before recognition struck her like a storm surge. Her hand fell limp at her side. She hadn't seen Mikoto in years, and now here she was, weathered, gaunt, a ghost of the girl she once knew—no, a wraith reborn, hardened by exile, by war.

“Onee-sa... Misaka-san,” Kuroko began, voice faltering as she corrected herself, the old reverence stripped away by time and distance.

Mikoto met her gaze. It took everything in her not to recoil. The memories swarmed her mind, a flood of raw uneasy emotions. What she told Misaki was true—Kuroko had always been a good person at heart. They had drifted apart, yes, but there was more to it than that. The incident. The clone.

The way Kuroko had found out about them. The way she had taken advantage of one.

For years, Mikoto had not been able to look her in the eyes. And yet, here they were.

“Nice hat,” Mikoto said at last, her voice impassive, eyes fixed on the police cap atop Kuroko's head.

Kuroko had no response, only tension—until she caught sight of Misaki, who had, with all the grace of a practiced courtesan, drifted up beside Mikoto and leaned against her with a soft, weary sigh. Kuroko's eyes widened. She had always wondered if those two had kept in touch, but the way Misaki draped herself against Mikoto as if drawn by an invisible tether... something felt different. They were clothed in the same rags of imprisonment, bound by the same struggle, yet the air between them was thick with something… dare she name as romantic?

“My Queen!” The familiar voice of purple-haired Junko shattered the moment, brimming with frantic relief.

Misaki turned, ever the picture of royal poise. “Pretty difficult place to find, huh~?” she teased, voice light as air.

“You wouldn’t believe the story... but! Look at you! What happened!? Are you—!” Junko's voice pitched with panic, her concern palpable.

“Tell me later, alright? I’m fine~,” Misaki soothed, her fingers brushing gently over Junko’s head, an absentminded gesture that softened the worry from her friend's face.

Mikoto, meanwhile, swept the room with a searching gaze, shielding her eyes against the flashing emergency lights. “Soooo, where’s that Aleister Crowley clone?”

“Aleister Crowley...?” Kuroko echoed, blinking in confusion.

Junko visibly tensed. “What?”

Misaki cleared her throat delicately. “Ah, well, it seems that Uiharu Kazari was dabbling in some devilry and, ah... revived Aleister Crowley. And orchestrated these death games,” she added with a nonchalance so profound it was almost surreal.

“Surely there’s some mistake,” Kuroko began. “Uiharu was one of the most—”

“One of the most fucked up people I’ve met,” Mikoto interrupted without hesitation, arms crossed.

“L-language!” Kuroko spluttered, visibly shaken.

Misaki, meanwhile, fixed her with a look of utter revulsion at the childish gesture.

Kuroko cleared her throat and looked the other way. “I don’t know what transpired here today, or yesterday in fact, but Uiharu being the puppeteer is surely a misdirection or—”

“Shirai-san,” she blinked. “Trust when I say Uiharu Kazari is nothing short of Amanozako herself.” Misaki’s face was serpentine as she looked to the policewoman, as if the mere defense of Uiharu was a personal affront.

Junko’s fingers tightened on Misaki's shoulder. “Then she’s dealt with?”

“Yes, Miko struck her down in a flash of magnificence~,” Misaki purred, the words imbued with a teasing lilt, though the pride in her voice was unmistakable. Mikoto scoffed, apparently too cool rubbing the bridge of her nose, but a faint pink faded onto her cheeks.

“Miko?” Junko’s head tilted, her lips curving into a knowing smile, the kind that held secrets yet to be spoken. Misaki visibly tensed, recoiling ever so slightly, as though caught in a scandalous act.

“Erm, ah, yes. My mind must be a bit exhausted and—” Misaki started, only to be cut off by Junko’s elbow nudging her in the ribs. Then again. “H-hey!”

“Such familiarity!” Kuroko said, her voice barely above a whisper, yet it carried the intensity of the storm raging inside her. Her heart cinched, sinking into the pit of her stomach.

Touma raised an eyebrow, caught between a grimace and a smirk. “I can’t say I’m surprised.”

Misaki huffed, nose turned up in mock defiance, but the shade of red blooming across her cheeks betrayed her composure.

Aisa’s gaze lingered, poignant as ever. “Weren’t you two a thing at one point?”

“No!” Mikoto and Misaki both shouted, voices harmonizing in a perfect chorus of mortification. Heat rushed to their faces, burning with an intensity neither could ignore. Misaki couldn’t help but turn to Mikoto confused.

“But you both liked each other, didn’t you?” Seiri mused, her words carrying an innocent curiosity, yet they struck Mikoto like a bolt of antimatter, leaving her breathless. It wasn’t irritation, was it? No… it was something else. Something she didn’t want to name.

“Sexually, maybe…” Touma muttered absentmindedly, scratching his chin, eyes drifting toward the ceiling.

Misaki let out an exaggerated sigh, masking her sudden flustered state with feigned indifference. “Smart girls grow up into women and get their heads screwed on straight~,” she sang, her voice saccharine, yet laced with an edge.

“More like screwed on gay,” came a voice from the floor—Kinuhata Saiai, of all people. Figures that menace would be here.

Misaki stiffened, her blush deepening as she looked away. Junko, on the other hand, practically beamed, her delight impossible to contain. For ten long years, her Queen had remained untouchable, wrapped in ice, invulnerable to even the warmest sun. But now? Now there was a crack in that perfect, polished exterior. Junko knew she was onto something when she pushed those two together back in middle school. They came so close in high school, but that whole red pony incident and…

“I guess I can see it,” Aisa commented idly, shifting her weight onto her boot as she casually pressed it into some shitbag VIP’s back. “She doesn’t act like other girls.”

“Compensation, huh?” Seiri whispered, conspiratorially, despite making no attempt to lower her voice.

“Leave Misa alone,” Mikoto snapped, and the words let loose before she could think, the heat in her chest flaring.

A beat of silence, and then—

“Ooooh, and she’s protective!” Aisa’s hands landed on her hips, her grin wicked.

“That’s actually kinda cute,” Seiri chimed in, voice light, teasing.

“I-it’s rude to talk about people like that in f-front of them!” Mikoto said, trying to save face as her body began to radiate heat.

“M-misa…?” Kuroko’s breath stuttered, her world tilting ever so slightly.

“A few days together and they already have pet names,” Touma chuckled, ruffling his own hair with a lazy grin.

Mikoto and Misaki both blushed furiously, whipping their heads away from each other with a synchronized huff. The nerve of them! What did they know about anything? Ever?

Aisa snickered, crossing her arms. “Well, at least he dodged a bullet, what with all the strange women after him.”

“It’s not my fault I’m this attractive,” Touma declared, flexing his bicep like a dorky teenager.

Misaki groaned, burying her face in her hands. “What did I ever see…” she mumbled, horrified at the mere thought.

Mikoto, arms still folded, gave a casual shrug. “It’s okay to have bad taste.”

Misaki snapped her head toward her, eyes narrowed. “You do realize you’re just insulting yourself at this point?”

Junko giggled, tilting her head with an impish grin. “Didn’t you also like him at some point, Misaka-san?”

“H-huh?” Mikoto reeled back, her eyes wide. “N-no. Not really. I was just… figuring myself out.” A pause. She sighed, gaze shifting downward. “It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t… sexual or anything. I think I just admired him. Like, I looked up to him because of my own messed-up sense of power or something.”

Junko clasped her hands together, continuing to beam. “My, my, Misaka-san! When did you become so introspective?”

Mikoto pouted, a tiny spark buzzing at her temple. “Shut up.”

But Junko just giggled, watching her old friend fondly. Despite the years, Mikoto was still the same—just a little taller, a little wiser. It made her heart feel strangely warm. Maybe once all of this was over, they could check out that new Gekota building in Shinjuku together. Just like old times…

Kuroko, however, stood motionless. Her heart ached, her vision hazy with the weight of realization pressing down on her chest. Her fingers balled into fists. “I thought I was over you,” she whispered, voice trembling as she stepped beside Mikoto. “I did everything to take you out of my mind, even as a friend…”

Mikoto turned to her, the teasing edge in her voice gone. “Listen, I—”

But before she could finish, a male voice from the other room cut through the tension.

“We might have a problem!?”

The next second, Sogiita Gunha came crashing through the wall, his body ragdolling across the floor. Dust and debris flew in all directions as a blinding blue glow seeped into the room, its source a familiar, nightmarish figure hovering in the air—an eerie, vacant expression carved into his face.

Aleister Crowley’s twisted clone.

Misaka Worst skidded in behind him, followed closely by Accelerator, their crimson eyes burning with irritation.

“Gee, looks like the gang’s all here,” Mikoto muttered, electricity crackling around her fingers.

Junko stepped forward, her usual cheer fading as she locked onto Crowley’s form. “Last Order and Puzzle-san are on the boat, keeping watch,” she said. “I brought as many competent people as I could find, but I wasn’t expecting… this.”

The moment the figure’s eyes ignited with that otherworldly glow, the room fractured into brilliance. Light poured forth—not like the warmth of the sun, but something raw, invasive, a radiance that scraped against reality itself. The air shimmered in rebellion. One of the bodies strewn across the floor convulsed, then pulsed with an iridescent cascade, as if her very being was unraveling into wavelengths beyond comprehension.

Misaki alone remained aware, not through sight but through thought. Her mind reached outward, finding the tangled consciousness of Saiai—except, no. No, it wasn’t her anymore.

And then, without transition, the room snapped back into existence.

Where Saiai had once lain, another figure stood—a presence that should have remained sealed in distant memory. Kazakiri Hyouka. A being thought erased with Crowley’s demise.

Her golden hair billowed outward, each strand unfurling like liquid light, its motion unbound by the physics that governed lesser things. Golden eyes, aglow with something unfathomable, swept across the room, their depth neither kind nor cruel—only absolute. Her halo, slightly askew, flickered like a broken star, while her wings, vast and luminescent, unfurled with the grace of something divine yet wholly alien.

Before understanding could take root, she moved.

In an instant, her fingers closed around Misaka Worst’s throat. A heartbeat later, Accelerator was gone—propelled upward with such force that the ceiling simply ceased to be, their form vanishing into the sky beyond. She had not touched Accelerator. She had not needed to.

Misaki’s mind recoiled. Vectors should have redirected the force. Should have—should have. But logic faltered in the face of this. This wasn’t physics. This wasn’t science.

Fucking magic.

“What the hell is even happening!?” Mikoto hissed, stepping forward without hesitation, instinctively positioning herself between Misaki and the hovering shade of Aleister Crowley.

A new voice entered the fray—familiar, but wrong.

“Don’t you get it?”

Kazari stepped through the wreckage, emerging from the ragged hole Aleister’s impact had left.

Her body was a ruin of charred flesh and raw sinew. Skin peeled from her bones in sloughing sheets, curling at the edges as if still devoured by invisible flames. Her hair, once soft and dark, burned in slow motion, embers eating their way through the strands. Her eyes—there were none. Just hollow sockets, weeping steam.

By every conceivable metric, she should have been dead.

“It’s like everything that could possibly go wrong is happening all at once,” Mikoto breathed, swallowing down the nausea that clawed its way up her throat. “Like someone broke the shit dam, and now there’s a tidal wave of—of—”

She grimaced. “A tidal wave of diarrhea coming right at us.”

“W-Wha!?” Kuroko’s voice cracked as she staggered back, eyes stretched wide with disbelief. “U-Uiharu…?”

She teleported before she had time to think, appearing beside Kazari in a blink, gasping for breath.

“Get away from her!” Mikoto shouted, but the warning came too late.

Touma lunged, shoving Kuroko aside.

For the briefest of moments, nothing happened.

Then Kazari reached out—not touching him, not even close—and froze the very movement of his atoms.

Misaki’s voice was steady, but a single bead of sweat traced a slow path down her cheek, betraying the true feeling of what she was about to say.

“Junko.” She did not blink. Did not look away. “I need you to run. Take everyone and go.”

Her tone was not pleading. It was final. A cold command wrapped in quiet resignation.

Kazari’s laughter rang out, hollow and jagged like rusted metal scraping against itself. “What’s wrong, Mentally Out of Your Mind?” she taunted, her voice a shrill echo in the cavernous ruin of what once was.

“But my Queen, we can’t leave you—”

“I’m not asking.”

Misaki did not turn to look at her. She did not shift, did not flinch, her entire being merely locked onto the horror before her.

Junko hesitated. Her breath stilled in her throat as she lowered her gaze, watching how each step Kazari took shattered the marble beneath her feet. The ground was breaking from her presence alone. A walking black hole, a slow and patient doom.

She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing herself to move, to live. “Everyone, move!”

And they did. One by one, slipping into the shadows, vanishing into the smoke-filled corridors.

All except Kuroko.

She stood, her entire frame trembling like a brittle leaf caught in an unforgiving wind, but she stepped forward anyway, her gaze flickering between Mikoto and the nightmare in front of them.

“You should go,” Misaki said, her voice detached, as if she were to a film, to the actors on the screen.

Kuroko let out a nervous laugh, but it was thin, fragile. “Y-you kidding? A-and miss all the action?”

“You’re going to die,” Mikoto said bluntly, each syllable a heavy thud, reverberating in her chest like a drumbeat. Her body radiated heat in slow, suffocating waves, the air thickened with the electric charge of repressed anger.

“S-she can’t be that—”

“You just saw what happened to Touma.” Mikoto’s voice cracked like a whip. “If you actually want to be useful, get that Aleister thing out of here.”

Kuroko swallowed hard. Nodded.

Then she turned her gaze toward Aleister.

Or, at least, what had been Aleister.

The thing hovering before them was no longer a man, nor anything that belonged to this world. Flesh gurgled, bubbled, split open like rotting fruit. Bones twisted into grotesque shapes, birthing new appendages where none should be. The skull had begun to rupture, splitting down the center like an overripe melon, something unspeakable crawling its way outward.

Kuroko’s stomach churned. Her hand clenched into a fist.

“Drown it,” Misaki’s voice slithered into her mind, unwanted, unwelcome. “Drown it in the ocean.”

Kuroko hesitated, if only for a breath. The sensation of another mind pressing into hers—oily, invasive—was something she had almost forgotten. Almost. Yet the moment it returned, the revulsion came with it, crawling beneath her skin like insects she couldn’t expel. It was obscene, grotesque in ways that words failed to capture.So gross. So wrong.

But she did not allow herself the indulgence of weakness. She was a soldier, after all. She had sworn herself to discipline, to duty. The moment she had enlisted after high school, she had surrendered any right to hesitation. Orders were orders, and she would follow them to the grave.

And so, with a flick of her will, the monstrous clone and the woman whose pigtails seemed a parody of youth ceased to be.

A similar fate shared by the VIP members in Kazari’s path. They did not suffer. There was no time for that. One moment, they existed; the next, their forms reached absolute zero, the atoms in their bodies ceasing all motion in an instant. Their matter, once vibrant with life, became nothing more than brittle husks, collapsing inward as if the universe itself had rejected their continued presence.

Gunha rose to his feet, the bones in his shoulders cracking like the prelude to a storm. He planted himself firm, a figure of unyielding defiance, eyes narrowing at the grotesque spectacle before him.

“What are we up against?” he asked, exhaling slowly, as if savoring the quiet before the inevitable.

“I don’t think you can do anything,” Mikoto said, her words cutting, devoid of comfort.

Gunha scoffed, a smirk playing at his lips. “And you can?”

“Just maybe,” she admitted, her fists tightening at her sides.

Gunha rolled his shoulders, his energy dancing around him in waves, invisible but tangible in the air between them. “I guess we’ll never really know until I try.”

“Don’t be a jackass!” Mikoto snapped, the warning thick with urgency.

But it was too late.

Gunha launched forward, his momentum tearing tiles from the floor. For all his bravado, for all his strength, he was still bound to the limitations of flesh and blood.

And flesh and blood were frail things.

Before Mikoto could so much as scream, Gunha’s body twisted, distorted—an abomination of physics transmutating before her eyes. It was as though someone had taken the essence of a human being and shredded it, scrambling the fundamental principles that tethered him to reality. His body collapsed into itself, a repugnant mass of muscle, bone, and liquefied organs—an unholy perversion of life itself. A scrambled egg of flesh. Gods help them.

The sight was repulsive. No, repulsive was too gentle a word. It was wrong. A violation of form, of existence, of the very idea of being human.

Misaki’s breath paused. She could feel her own heartbeat in her throat, jackhammering against her ribs as if trying to escape.

Kazari came to a halt in the center of the devastation, her charred skin a grotesque mosaic of agony and power. She grinned, teeth glistening, unnervingly bright against the ashen ruin of her flesh.

“Do you realize it yet, Mikoto?” she purred. Her voice dripped with something sickly sweet, the kind of tone one might use to comfort a dying pet. “What I’ve done to these pathetic fools—I could do to you, too. In an instant. IN. AN. INSTANT!” Her voice crescendoed into a banshee’s wail, her hair igniting into a roaring inferno, flames dancing like the hounds of Hell eager to devour.

Misaki swallowed, her throat dry as parchment. “I hate to ask, but you do have a plan, don’t you?”

“As it happens,” Mikoto murmured, her gaze locked onto Kazari’s, “I’m torn between two ideas.”

The chamber pulsed with raw energy, the walls trembling under the oppressive weight of Kazari’s power. The heat was suffocating, thick with the scent of burning metal and scorched ozone. Yet Mikoto stood firm, her silhouette outlined in the crimson glow of impending destruction.

She wiped the dried blood from her mouth with the back of her hand, her expression dark, resolute. “Tch. Should’ve known a little magma wouldn’t be enough.”

Kazari smirked. “You’re learning.”

And Mikoto acted.

Lightning buzzed through her fingers, its jagged tendrils licking the air hungrily, sparks crawling over her knuckles. This time, she wouldn’t hold back. A low hum vibrated through the room—not a sound, but a distortion, a break in the very fabric of space. The temperature dropped precipitously, as if the laws of thermodynamics themselves were folding in on a singularity's edge—a deeper, quantum-level disturbance—entropy’s grip slipping as it bled along with the universe through the fabric of reality.

Kazari’s smirk faltered.

The air itself twisted, light bending as reality began to come apart in a perfect, collapsing spiral. Electromagnetism. Gravitational compression. Spacetime warping inwards into a singularity.

Mikoto was shaping a rift in the geometry of space—an anomaly that defied the natural laws, a zone where Kazari's influence could not touch, where even entropy dared not tread.

For a brief heartbeat, the distortion held.

Kazari lurched. Her equilibrium shattered as the singularity's edge reached for her, its gravitational pull like an invisible hand grasping at her AIM field, threatening to tear her apart. She inhaled, the sensation foreign, like a slow suffocation beneath an unseen weight. Something was wrong—something beyond her reach.

Then, it all collapsed.

Mikoto's gaze widened in disbelief, watching as the AIM rift—a swirling mass of bent space and twisted time—began to unravel like a thread pulled from the very weave of the cosmos. The once-solid rupture in reality vanished as if it had never been there, evaporating into the nothingness it had tried to conquer.

“What—”

Kazari's laughter shattered the silence.

“You almost had me. Again.” Her tone was taunting, as if this game was an old, familiar dance. She shifted her posture, hands resting casually on her hips. “But you forgot one thing, didn’t you, you silly little brute? You forgot about the second law of thermodynamics.”

Mikoto's gut clenched.

“You were attempting to construct a place where entropy doesn't exist?” Kazari's voice dropped to a mocking whisper. “How quaint. But entropy is a force of nature, a measure of disorder that governs all things, and disorder is but probability in the end. Singularities do not exist in reality. Even black holes radiate, little bug.”

Mikoto’s stomached dropped as the realization pierced her like a dagger.

Hawking radiation. It did exist.

Her pseudo-singularity—her fragile creation—was never a true void. It leaked. Its energy, constantly displacing itself in microbursts, was scattering back into the universe. It couldn't hold, couldn't stay contained. It was a delicate balance, and once entropy had found its way back, even for a moment, the illusion shattered.

Kazari’s smile grew crueler. “And the moment probability exists again—“

The almost singularity folded in on itself with a catastrophic implosion, its fragile existence collapsing into a cascade of raw force.

Mikoto and Misaki were thrown backward, crashing into the wall with bone-rattling force. Mikoto’s body was crushed by the impact, the air ripped from her lungs, and Misaki’s strained breath echoed beside her.

Kazari moved like a photon bending through spacetime, her path dictated by the curvature of unitary world lines dictating her inevitability. Her hand rose in a fluid motion. Energy fluctuated around her fingers, oscillating with subatomic precision, bending the space around her like the distortion of light near a black hole.

“You almost won,” she mused, her voice devoid of warmth. “But almost isn’t enough. I’ll carve through your queen bee slowly, piece by piece, and when she’s gone, I’ll rip each and every nerve out of you. One by one.”

She lifted her hand—

Kazari’s head snapped to the side just in time to see a searing emerald beam rip through the space where she had been standing milliseconds before. She barely dissipated the energy from the odd beam, but the concussive force ripped through the walls, sending molten slag flying in all directions.

“That was close,” a voice drawled from the entrance, laden with sardonic amusement.

Meltdowner stepped forward, her single visible eye glittering with mischief and deadly intent. Her posture was taut, battle-ready. “Sorry to crash the party, but all the noise up here was giving me a headache.”

Kazari’s socketsnarrowed, calculating. Without hesitation, she lifted a hand and scrambled the frequency of Meltdowner’s next attack before it even fired.

The beam fractured, splitting apart into thousands of microscopic, high-energy rays—
The result was instant.

A guttural scream tore from Meltdowner’s throat as the errant energy sliced through her shoulder, ravaging her flesh down to the bone. She staggered back, barely maintaining her balance, her body trembling from the pain.

Kazari advanced, her other hand rising with the finality of a death sentence—

And then—

“Hey, Kazari.”

The voice, jagged as lightning, split the air behind her.

Kazari froze mid-motion. Her heart, both dead and alive, skipped a beat, the air saturating with tension. Her eyes widened just before she turned—

Mikoto stood before her. Her entire body was alight with a luminous white glow, crackling with electricity that danced like living fire across her skin. Her form vibrated, pulsed, radiated with an intensity beyond anything Kazari had ever seen. Was that—? A tail? No, not a tail—something far stranger, far more volatile, a whip of energy that seemed to thrash from her body.

And then—

In Mikoto's hand, light itself was no longer just a murky quantum aberration—it had become real. A thin, nearly invisible line, shimmering with blue-white brilliance, stretched out before her. It was so sharp that geometry and gravity bent around its edge. No heat. No glow. Just a perfect void—a nothingness that existed in defiance of all that was.

Kazari’s sockets contracted, her breath hitching in her throat.

Her mind scrambled to understand what she was witnessing, but the truth eluded her. She couldn’t process it. She couldn’t—

And that was the last thought she had.

Mikoto moved.

One step. One stroke.

A blur of white—a violent flicker of light, a rift through the air—a moment so fleeting that time seemed to warp around it, as if the universe was forced to acknowledge something beyond its comprehension.

Kazari didn’t react. She couldn’t. Time bent, then shattered, in that heartbeat, and her body was too slow to follow the pace of actuality. A slow pull of the air, a gust that brushed against her skin like a whisper of something other. Her senses, once so sharp, were dulled by the impossibility of it—by the strangeness around her.

Her mouth opened, but no sound came.

And then—

Her torso separated, sliced free from her waist, with a grace that defied everything known to existence.

There was no explosion, no eruption of flesh or violent spalttering of blood. No heat. No fire. Only a single, perfect line—a separation so exact, so precise, that it defied the concepts of life and death. The laws of physics themselves had been rewritten at that moment, and the universe had paused to allow this impossible act to unfold. The world seemed to fold in on itself at the point of contact. The cut didn’t burn, didn’t sever the flesh in the way that simple violence might. It didn’t even tear. It unmade her—rendered her an abstraction of form. There was no rupture, no raggedness. Just the quiet, methodical perfection of a separation too subtle for mortal minds to grasp, too beyond the scope of the human mind.

Kazari’s upper body tilted, the shock of the moment still struggling to reach her mind. Her sockets—wide and still—locked with Mikoto’s, as if the last shreds of her understanding clung to that gaze; although Mikoto wasn’t sure how she could see at all. Her lips moved in vain, but no sound came. Not a breath. Not a whisper. She had no voice left. Not now.

And then—

She fell.

The two halves of her body hit the ground without a sound, but the pair heard it in their thoughts somehow—like a distant, wet echo through an empty chamber. The air was still, allowing the silence to envelop the room. Steam, or something like steam, rose from the edges of the wound where Kazari’s body had been cut, exploding and imploding simultaneously into strange patterns before dissipating into the atmosphere. The perfection of the cut had left no remnants of violence—just a void that closed with a thunderous clap that shook the entire planet, throwing it off its axis ever so slightly.

Mikoto exhaled slowly, her breath steady, as if the tension that had held her in place was released all at once. The plasma line in her hand faded, flickering out like an ember in the wind, vanishing as if it were never there to begin with. Her skin color returned to normal, and her tail vanished.

Behind her, Meltdowner stood frozen, her gaze fixed on the spot Kazari’s body once existed. Misaki, wrapped tightly around herself, and shivered, unable to tear her eyes from the sight.

Mikoto cast one final glance at the spot of empty ruin, Kazari’s body split with such precision, such elegance, that it seemed less like destruction and more like a reluctant art. Her expression remained unreadable. And then, her words fell into the stillness.

“…Don’t come back this time.”

The words hung in the air like a prayer to a god that would never answer. She turned then, walking away without so much as another peek. As she did, the heavens seemed to release a collective breath, reality forever changed in ways the women would never come to realize.

The silence that followed was deafening.

Though her body was gone, the image was embedded in their minds: There was no lingering heat from the cut, no cauterized edges to suggest the violence of the strike. There was no eruption of blood, no spray of flesh. Just the sterile absence of any wound—clean, perfect, precise—like the ending of a chapter in a book never meant to be read. The wound itself was too clean, too absolute, as though entropy itself had been frozen in place. Misaki didn’t like it one bit—it went against every instinct in the hive that was her mind.

The plasma blade Mikoto had wielded was not the traditional tool of a warrior; it was something far more rarefied, more refined. An energy state so extreme, so pure, that it transcended the simple violence of heat. It was a thing that negated the very possibility of entropy. It was absolute.

Unlike conventional plasma blades, which operated by sheer thermal energy, vaporizing material through intense heat, this blade did something else. The blade’s electromagnetic field was stabilized in such a way that it reached temperatures so low, that for the fleeting shimmer of an attosecond, it dipped below absolute zero, that it collapsed the very concept of molecular motion. The point of contact with Kazari’s body was not one of burning heat but a cessation—a stopping of all atomic vibrations as though they never existed to begin with. A kind of stillness where entropy could not exist. Mikoto herself was unsure how she managed to pull it off. For a moment, she truly shifted phases beyond that of a Level 5. Was it love that pushed her through in the end?

In that instant, all molecular activity—every atom that had once made Kazari whole—came to a halt, reversing in time. The structural integrity of her body, once governed by the forces of atomic interactions, ceased to function and regressed. Her body shattered like glass before imploding—a brittle, cold fissure that existed outside the natural order of decay.

But Kazari had not gone without leaving one final mark.

The moment Mikoto made contact, a wave of disorder erupted from Kazari’s body. Her very presence was a defense—a final act of resistance, a spontaneous burst of stochastic energy, desperately fighting against its unraveling—rippling outward like the disturbance caused by a stone cast into the stillest of an ocean frozen in time. But this was no simple ripple; it was chaos incarnate, the kind of primordial tumult that would tear at the seams of the world and swallow it whole if left unchecked. Her very presence became a fortress of disorder, a wall that struck at the carefully woven structure of quantum fields. Mikoto had but the briefest of moments to respond, and in that moment, her own body—the very vessel that had so defied the impossible up until now—began to rebel. Kazari’s body seemed to exude a barrier of disorder, an automatic reflex against anything at all, as if her AIM field could not bear the thought of being reduced to nothingness.

Pain, sharp and unyielding, coursed through her arm. The sleeve of her shirt, once a neat barrier between her flesh and the world, disintegrated into a motley scatter of particles—atoms unbound, as if even the fields could not withstand the onslaught of entropy. Her skin, once warm with life, now seethed as if caught between two impossible extremes. A bone-chilling cold raced through her veins even as a feverish heat consumed her, both sensations crashing together, fighting for dominance in the confines of her trembling body. Her nerves, which had so skillfully processed the world, now misfired, each one singing its discordant note. Heat, cold, pain, numbness—these sensations wove together in a mad tapestry of conflicting agony.

Mikoto staggered backward, her legs buckling beneath her. She could no longer tell where her skin ended and the rest of the world began, so twisted had her body become by the violent tug of disorder that Kazari had unleashed. Her wrist, the very conduit through which life had passed mere moments ago, throbbed with an intensity that seemed beyond any natural affliction. The molecules of her body—those small, unseen dancers that composed her being—god they fucking hurt. For an instant, she feared that her fingers themselves might break apart, as the very laws that held her together were becoming frayed, disintegrating into their component parts. Entropy had not merely breached the door of Misaka Mikoto’s existence—it was pushing its way into the very marrow of her soul, eroding her from the inside out.

It was a mercy that she had pulled back when she did. Had she stayed just a fraction longer, the bonds that held her together—those fragile, delicate strings that kept her form intact—would have dissolved, and she, too, would have been swept away into the void of random particles, her existence completely undone. Fucking dead. Just like as if she jumped in front of the train that day. All Mikoto could do was use her own powers to hold the bonds together in a trepidating attempt to stabilize herself.

But Kazari was dead. And Mikoto was still standing.

And with that, she turned away.

Still, she could not ignore the dissonant echoes of that close call. Her breath came in ragged bursts, uneven and trembling. The muscles in her arm screamed, and her chest, battered from the collision of forces she had barely escaped, tightened with the remnants of terror and pain. Mikoto stood there for a long moment, watching her hand, the very source of that near-dissolution, as it began its slow return to a state of relative stability. Okay, okay.

In the quiet aftermath, the universe held its breath, or perhaps the effects were radiating out far, far away now. The battle had ended. It was over. Kazari was no more. The weight of the moment pressed against Mikoto’s chest, and she exhaled shakily, the very act of breathing a defiant statement in a world that had, for a moment, almost torn her apart. Maybe, just maybe, she might find peace after such a climax.

Her vision swam before her, edges soft and blurry, but she forced herself to level. She caught a glimpse of Misaki’s face, her eyes wide with concern, her hand reaching for Mikoto as she stumbled forward. There was no pain in her touch, only the quiet assurance of someone who had seen it all before. Mikoto, barely able to stand on her own, looked up to her, and for just a moment—just a heartbeat—she smiled. The smile was small, crooked, but it held the feeling of something more precious than words.

“I-… I did it, haha…” she whispered, though the sound came out friable, like a broken thing struggling to hold itself together.

“You did it,” Misaki replied sweetly, her lips brushing Mikoto’s forehead in a soft, gentle kiss. It was warm, familiar, and it grounded Mikoto, steadying her trembling heart. For a fleeting moment, the pain ebbed away, and in its place blossomed something tender, something as warm and unyielding as the sunlight at the beginning of a quiet spring.

But that fleeting moment, that sanctuary of warmth, did not last.

From the wreckage of the room above, the distant echo of something breaking—a roof, a floor, perhaps even the very foundation that had kept the building intact—sent a shuddering groan through the air. The ground below shook as something—or someone—descended like a meteor. A splash echoed, riffling out as the form crashed through the floors, and in an instant, the sight of Kazakiri tearing through the space above them filled the room. She fell like a comet, her figure cloaked in the twilight of shattered debris, before a wet sound pierced the silence.

At the same time, Accelerator and Worst—both bruised and battered beyond recognition—tumbled into view, landing roughly on the floor below. Worst had a nail embedded deep into her arm, her leg broken in two places, while Accelerator sported a shattered arm and a blackened eye.

But they were alive. They were here.

And in that moment, just as the quiet settled, Kuroko teleported in with an easy laugh, her bloody nose a testament to the battle she had fought and won.

“Who knew mutants couldn’t mutate gills?” she said, the words casual, almost whimsical.

Everyone stared at her. Mikoto, exhausted to the bone, bobbed her head slightly, the weight of the day dragging her down. Misaki, ever the quiet observer, offered nothing but her indifference—Kazari was dead, that was all that mattered. Accelerator, already disinterested, turned and began walking back toward the exit.

But it was Worst who broke the stillness.

For some reason, her lips parted, and a laugh—harsh, broken, and yet somehow infectious—escaped her. It was followed quickly by Kuroko’s chuckle, light and disarming, as if they shared some unspoken bond in their shared battles.

And then the two of them were laughing. Laughing. “Right?” Kuroko said.

Mikoto’s head throbbed. A dull, insistent pulse behind her eyes that threatened to split her apart, but she could not stop it. They laughed, and it grated against her ears, their laughter so foreign to the ache in her head. She wanted—no, she needed—silence. She needed the peace of stillness, the soft, comforting embrace of nothingness to cradle her in its arms. But all she could hear, all she could feel, was the piercing of that laughter, too loud, too harsh against the backdrop of everything that had just unfolded.

She wanted quiet. She wanted rest. She wanted plump, squishy pillows to bury herself in, to shut out the world and its endless clamor.

But the laughter continued, raucous and unyielding. And Mikoto, despite the pain, despite the exhaustion, could not bring herself to do anything but endure.

Misaki’s hand settled gently on Mikoto’s shoulder, her touch a small beacon of warmth that flickered through the depths of Mikoto’s wearied mind. For the briefest of moments, it felt like a lifeline in the ocean of her thoughts, a hand extended toward the shore of calm after a stochastic tempest. The tension that had wrapped itself around Mikoto’s ribs, like some invisible weight pressing her to the earth, seemed to dissolve with that simple gesture. It was a quiet thing, almost imperceptible, yet in the hush of the room, it was enough to pull Mikoto from the dark reverie in which she had found herself drifting.

She looked up, and in the soft light, she saw Misaki's eyes—those deep, steady eyes that always seemed to see through the world’s veils and into the heart of things. There was no judgment there, no pity. Just the quiet certainty that they would face whatever came next together. And then, as if guided by some unspoken understanding, a slow smile bloomed on Misaki’s lips. It was a gentle thing, no triumph or harshness, just the kind of smile that could settle the storm within. The smile of a queen, and a queen alone, who had seen much of the world’s cruelty but chose still to carry grace through it all.

The world around them, so loud in its sudden madness, seemed to fade away. The swirling chaos of the battle, the echoes of violence that had just shaken the very nucleotides of their existence—now, in this quiet moment between them, all of it seemed distant. Almost like a dream, so fragile, so fleeting. Mikoto allowed herself a small sigh, feeling it all lift just a little. Her pulse began to slow as she allowed herself to surrender, just for a moment, to Misaki’s presence. The storm within her had passed, but it was the calm between the gusts, that precious silence, that offered the true solace.

Mikoto lifted her hand and grasped Misaki’s with a soft firmness, her fingers curling around hers like a quiet promise—a pact forged in the silence between two hearts that had, in their own ways, endured the worst of the world. She rose to her feet, her body still heavy with exhaustion, but Misaki’s hand anchored her, steadying her in a way that words could never quite reach.

With a simple nod, Mikoto gestured toward the door, her fingers still interwoven with Misaki’s. She didn’t need to say anything. The gesture alone spoke volumes—a silent invitation to leave the wreckage behind, to step away from the ruin of all that had transpired. There would be no more bloodshed today. No more struggle. There would only be the quiet steps of two souls, moving forward into whatever waited beyond the threshold.

Together, they walked. The air around them seemed to breathe with a different rhythm now. The lingering weight of battle that had pressed down on Mikoto's shoulders felt lighter, as if the very act of walking beside Misaki was enough to defy the gravity of it all. She could feel the tension of a lifetime unwind, knot by knot, as their footsteps echoed through the hall, the sound soft and yet grounding, like the ticking of a clock moving forward again after a long, uncertain pause.

And yet, even as they moved away from the wreckage of the moment, the world was not still. Behind them, the echoes of chaos still hummed in the air, carried on the wind like some forgotten memory that would not quite fade. But here, in this brief sanctuary, it mattered little. She had Misaki with her, and it’s all she ever really wanted.

There was a certain peace in that. A peace that, for all its simplicity, felt like the most profound thing Mikoto had ever known.