The Bellwreath learned again. It divided—two halves trying to pincer the line. Provocation’s pulse forced one half to reconsider; East-Ward’s sink hooks snagged the other.

“Money check,” Kana sang while jamming her shoulder under a writhing segment. “What’s the per-segment bonus, Ootori?”

“¥120,000 per purified segment,” Ootori said. “Eyes are ¥60,000 each if prismatic. Teeth are worthless except for bar decor. Please do not bring me teeth.”

“Copy,” Kana said. “No teeth for the office.”

They ground the river down. Raina’s precision shots spiked the right command heads. Dragonspear carved glyphs in motion. Cloud Ladder kept the vapor blowing clean. Miyu’s field never wavered, the gentle pressure of a hand between your shoulders when you try to stand up too fast.

At 32%, the Bellwreath finally tried something truly mean. It flattened, spread, and turned into a rolling carpet with teeth: a street-width grinder that would have chewed a bus without blinking.

“Up!” Anastasia barked.

Suncrest hopped onto anchors and pylons, East-Ward pogoed lines, Dragonspear bounded to the tops of their own embedded blades. The river rolled under like a bad dream. Anastasia dropped with it, met the next rise, planted the Aegis down like a gravestone and Radiant Mauled in a wide, DEF-scaled sweep that turned the nearest four segments to obedient jelly.

“Open,” she said.

Dragonspear opened them.

The last 12% went fast because sometimes you earn a momentum that belongs to everyone. The river writhed thinly. East-Ward hauled it down to the waterline for the final pin.

“Finish,” Ootori said softly.

Raina took the last eye. The Bellwreath seized, then simply… came apart, each segment dissolving to light that rose like bubbles.

BOSS SUBJUGATED (2/2). CLAIM REWARDS TO EXIT.

GATE(S) STABILIZING… CLOSURE IN 00:00:06…

A gentle pull. Stomachs lifted. The world blinked, washed, and set itself back down a half-inch to the right. Sea air returned to being just salt. The bells puckered and vanished with a courteous pop.

For a few seconds no one spoke. Then the promenade erupted—cheers, crying, phones held like lanterns. Coalition comms chimed reward partitions.

[REWARD // COALITION SPLIT SUMMARY]

Primary: Tidehelm Kirin (Gold) — ¥280,000,000

Secondary: Bellwreath Naga (Gold) — ¥220,000,000

Civic Hazard Bonus (Tier IV containment): ¥90,000,000

Materials:

 • Kirin Antler Kelp (x8) — Dragonspear (weapon grafting)

 • Tidehelm Plate (x10) — Suncrest (armor lab)

 • Prismatic Naga Eyes (x14) — Raina (marksmanship optics fund)

 • Naga Tendon Cords (x26) — East-Ward (line upgrades)

Gate Credits:

 • Suncrest Contribution: 31% → ¥184,900,000

    - Team Suncrest Member Shares (per contract):

        Anastasia (Anchor Lead) — 35%

        Raina (Marks) — 22%

        Miyu (Medic) — 22%

        Kana (Vanguard) — 21%

Civic Merit: +5 (all present)

Kana whistled low, hands on hips, hair stuck to her temples. “That’s… several rents.”

Raina, already logging optics adjustments, didn’t look up. “That’s a new barrel and a vacation day.”

Miyu wiped her brow, then very deliberately slid her hand into Anastasia’s. “That’s chiffon cake,” she said, small and certain.

Anastasia squeezed, gentle. “Let’s go earn the cake by eating it.”

They did the after-war chores: tagging scorch and acid, helping East-Ward coil lines and count fingers (all present), business-card exchanges with Dragonspear’s captain (“We cut where you point—call us”), and gentle laughs with the shopkeepers who had watched a god-stag nose their storefront and still made time to ask if anyone needed water.

Officer Takada arrived, wide-eyed and a little hoarse. “I thought Shibuya was the biggest thing I’d see this week. I was wrong.”

“You did your job,” Anastasia said. “That’s the biggest thing.”

He bowed, deeper than regulation. “The city sleeps because people like you don’t.”

“People like us,” Anastasia corrected. “Go eat something salty.”

He jogged off, laughing.

Suncrest’s van smelled like towels, barley tea, and relief. As Ootori debriefed with the coalition, Anastasia passed cans around, the act so ordinary after the extraordinary that it steadied everyone’s blood pressure.

“Guildmaster says coalition dinner,” Kana reported, scrolling texts. “But after tea.”

“After tea,” Anastasia confirmed. She glanced to Miyu. “Ready?”

Miyu nodded, suddenly shy despite having just stitched a battlefield together. “Yes.”

They cleaned up as much as hunters ever did, which is to say they made themselves minimally presentable for a neighborhood that had watched them turn horror into math. On the way to Ebisu, Kana narrated loudly on group chat about spending choices (“I’m buying a rice cooker that intimidates me”) while Raina sent an image of a scope’s crosshair overlay with a tiny heart drawn where the Bellwreath command eye had been. Ootori forwarded a note from City Hall: Thank you. Repairs budget approved. Please accept two crates of sports drinks and a questionable fruit basket. Cloud Ladder spammed wind emojis. East-Ward sent a photo of a bent pike with the caption: Retiring this old man. He served well.

The tea shop was quiet light and birch wood. Citrus steam and the soft scrape of plates. Anastasia ordered yuzu matcha chiffon and two cups without looking at the menu. She did this not to impress but because she’d listened when Miyu had once said, tired after a hard week, “Citrus makes me feel like the air has a shape I can stand up in.”

They sat. They breathed. The cake was cloud-light and behaved on forks.

Miyu cupped her tea as if warming something important. “You said earlier you don’t joke about tea or about spending time with people you admire.”

“I meant it,” Anastasia said. “I admire the way you stitch fear into function.”

Miyu’s mouth tugged. “I admire the way you make standing still look like a solution.”

“That’s my job,” Anastasia said. “Stand still until the world remembers how.”

They ate. Outside, life re-threaded itself: gulls, scooters, laughter, the argument of traffic. Phones buzzed with edits of the fight; hashtags trended: #TwinBells, #SuncrestWall, #KanaDon’tEatTheBoss (Kana pouted at that one).

Raina leaned into the doorway long enough to smirk. “You two good?”

“We’re excellent,” Anastasia said.

“Coalition dinner at seven,” Raina said. “Also, a message from the IGA research desk. They want to debrief you about the harmonic. Something about your shield’s curtain aligning with the bell shape.”

“Of course,” Anastasia said. “We’ll share what we felt.”

Miyu’s gaze slid to the window, then back. “Do you ever… worry that if you share too much, somebody else will try to stand like you and break?”

“I worry about a lot of things,” Anastasia said. “That’s why I stand there. So they don’t have to.” She tilted her head. “But I also believe in teaching. Not everyone will hold like I do. But more people can learn to breathe, set their feet, and make a small wall where they are. A small wall saves a life.”

Miyu exhaled. “That’s very… motherly.”

“I’ve been called worse,” Anastasia said wryly. “I like feeding people. With food. And time.”

“What about feeding them hope?”

“That too,” Anastasia said. “But hope is stickier than frosting.”

Miyu laughed, half surprised by her own ease. She set her cup down. “Nana—Anastasia. After dinner, would you—would you like to walk?”

“I would,” Anastasia said simply.

Kana, lurking, gave two enthusiastic thumbs-up through the window until Raina pulled her away by the collar.

The debrief with IGA in the late afternoon was graphs and curiosity. Research staff in jumpsuits asked polite, breathless questions about “curtain shear,” “bell-shaped resonance damping,” “coalition bracing synergy.” Anastasia explained what it felt like, because sometimes the body has language that data wants to know. Miyu described how healing threads reacted when the harmonic peaked. Raina mapped kill windows. Kana demonstrated the correct way to bully a river.

On the ride to coalition dinner, Tokyo wore its twilight well. Streetlamps blinked awake. Neon warmed. The bay, freshly scolded, looked innocent.

Kana stretched like a cat. “So, Goddess, what’s the game if a Mythic drops? I’ve never punched anything that hard and I absolutely want to, but I also like my skeleton.”

“Game is evacuate hard, thin the add waves, and call the national assets,” Raina said before Anastasia could answer. “And stand behind Nana if she says to.”

“Mythic probability is low,” Ootori said from the front, watching the city roll by. “But it’s never zero. We train for it. We pay for the training with today’s money.”

“Today paid well,” Kana said, then softened. “We kept the shops.”

“We did,” Anastasia said.

Phone buzz. A message from a number she didn’t recognize, tagged by the guild system as Shibuya Bakery: Thank you for making Hachikō-dōri safe. Please accept bread tomorrow morning. We have mochi. And chiffon if you want. A second ping from Officer Takada: Ate something salty. You were right.

Anastasia smiled, the kind of small, private smile a city hopes its heroes keep to themselves so they have some softness left to live by.

That night, coalition dinner was loud in the way survival is. East-Ward toasted their retired pike. Cloud Ladder and Dragonspear argued cheerfully over the best ramen within five blocks. Suncrest shared plates and stories and paid their bill properly.

At the end of the day, after the laughter and the game plans and the checklists for tomorrow’s training, Anastasia walked with Miyu along a quiet street where lanterns made puddles of calm.

“You said earlier,” Miyu said, “that you flirt because you like people.”

“I do,” Anastasia said. “I flirt because it makes the air lighter. But with you, I am simply… glad.”

Miyu looked at her hands. “I would like to be… simply glad with you again.”

“Tomorrow,” Anastasia said, “we train. After, we try a new tea place. I hear they do black sesame roll cake.”

Miyu nodded, the certainty fitting her shoulders. “Okay.”

They stood there a moment. Tokyo hummed. The world, always ready to end, had chosen not to—because hands held lines, because shields made promises, because a woman who liked tea and chiffon cake and flirting with girls also liked standing exactly where the worst thing wanted to go and saying, with quiet authority, no.

Suncrest’s group chat pinged once more before sleep. A notice from IGA: Harmonic research proceeding. Twin Bells logged. Coalition commendations filed. And a footnote: Unrelated: minor Bronze-class pings in Setagaya. Routine.

Anastasia put her phone face down. She looked out at a city she had chosen to love like a person.

“Tomorrow,” she said, to no one or maybe to Tokyo. “We hold again. We make money. We keep you whole.”

She slept easy, a shield propped by the bed like an umbrella waiting for rain.