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1. Running Giants, or: Settling the Swamp
"the last game has to be this one."
"Yes. ...And this time, little big sister — we settle it properly."
After resupplying on sugar and restoring every available reserve of energy and fighting spirit, Ledea and Kanoa made their way to the deepest corner of Gaming Galaxy: a dome-mounted full-immersion cockpit simulator, the largest and most elaborate attraction in the entire facility.
The game was Machina: Zenith Rebellion.
Players took the controls of a giant humanoid war machine — a Machina — navigating complex terrain to complete a series of mission objectives while simultaneously competing against a rival pilot and being permitted, explicitly, to interfere with each other as directly as they liked. It was the most prestigious head-to-head title in the building, and it happened to be the game these two had played once before, at an earlier point in their rivalry, without ever managing to reach a conclusion.
They settled into the heavy simulator seats. Both of them moved through the machine selection screen with the ease of people who had thought about this in advance.
Ledea selected Arden: a newly added unit whose deep violet-black armor was traced with gold lines that suggested embroidery on formal wear. Beautiful to look at. Genuinely monstrous in practice. Its loadout was extreme close-combat by design — a specialized impact-fist and a beam sword, nothing else — while its thruster output was abnormal in the most clinical sense of the word. The acceleration profile was so violent and so irregular that a wave of players had reported spatial disorientation upon first attempting it, and the machine had been designated high-difficulty for beginners before its launch week was over. Ledea gripped the controls, chin up.
Kanoa selected High Pressure: a sky-blue heavy armor unit with a loadout built around brute firepower — hand cannon, bazooka, the kind of armaments that communicated intent through sheer mass. The color scheme was almost an inverse of Kanoa's own red hair, and carried some distant suggestion of her sister's.
"Combat mission initiated. Field: Fortress City Sector."
The electronic announcement came, and the vast virtual battlefield deployed in both their sightlines at once.
The rules of the mode were straightforward and merciless: complete mission objectives as they appeared across the map while your opponent does the same, and direct interference between players is not only permitted but expected.
The machines that entered that field were entirely different in type. The battle that unfolded was nonetheless a dead heat from the opening moment.
Ledea's Arden cut through the city blocks at speed that shouldn't have been achievable — zig-zagging between tower facades, using angle and acceleration to stay ahead of everything aimed at it. Kanoa's High Pressure answered with the logic of pure attrition: when you have enough firepower, you don't need to predict a path, you simply demolish the route entirely. The score gauge moved in fractions. Each lead evaporated within seconds. By any objective measure, they were exactly even.
In the mid-stage sequence, the two machines found themselves in close quarters — a narrow fortress corridor, barely wide enough for one Machina, and suddenly occupied by both. Kanoa fired her heavy bazooka at close range. The shot grazed Arden's fuselage and took a significant portion of its shield rating with it.
"You're going to pay for that, Kanoa! That was my shield integrity from a graze—!"
"you keep moving like that. ...next one won't miss."
Kanoa's High Pressure stepped backward as it spoke, bringing the hand cannon up and sweeping a full suppression pattern across the corridor. A retreating volley — mobile, continuous, designed to punish any attempt to close distance.
"Of all the underhanded—!"
Ledea hammered at the controls. Arden's thrusters responded at the absolute edge of what she could manage; the camera spun in several directions that were not the ones she'd intended.
"The screen is — rotating — this machine is genuinely extreme—"
She pushed through it. Pedal input. Correction. Correction again. Arden found its line.
The match entered its final phase.
Deep in the fortress sector, at the center of the map: the Main Core, pulsing red, completely undefended, waiting to be destroyed by whichever pilot reached and struck it first.
Both of them saw it at exactly the same time.
Neither of them moved toward it.
What each of them thought, in approximately the same moment, was this: stop the other pilot first — completely, definitively — and then destroy the core at leisure. The satisfaction of that sequence is worth the extra time.
Two girls. One thought. No significant variation.
The unguarded Main Core, glowing helpfully in the center of both their screens, ceased to exist as a relevant consideration.
"i'm not letting you near that core. little big sister — go down."
"That's my line entirely. You overloaded your build on firepower and now you can't catch my beam sword — you're going to lose this on manoeuvrability alone!"
Arden closed the distance along the fastest available vector and drew a deep cut across High Pressure's armor with the beam sword. High Pressure answered with a point-blank hand cannon burst — the ricochet from the wall sent fragments into Arden's plating. Sparks and impact effects filled both screens. Two pilots were no longer thinking about missions or objectives or cores. They were thinking only about the person in the other cockpit, and what an extremely satisfying thing it would be to completely defeat them.
Outside the simulator domes, the external monitors showed everything.
"Sis is absolutely seething in there — look at her grip on the controls — an angry sis is still the most incredible sis—!"
"Kanoa's hands are so tense around that controller. She's trying so hard. So precious~"
Shutia and Asphi watched side by side, in the grip of twin varieties of the same warm feeling, and with entirely identical impulses:
"«Keeping this forever.»"
Perfectly synchronized. Both of them quietly raised their devices and began recording.
Then, at the moment the firefight reached its absolute peak —
Both main monitors went red.
『— MISSION FAILED —』
『TIME EXPIRED: Main objective (Core) was not destroyed within the time limit.』
"...I beg your—"
"...oh."
Two sets of hands went still at exactly the same instant.
On the other side of the screen: two Machina units, both running on the last scraps of their respective durability ratings, standing in front of the perfectly intact Main Core with the specific posture of machines that had simply forgotten it was there.
Time had run out.
In their comprehensive focus on dismantling each other, both pilots had allowed the game's mission clock to expire. The system had processed this as a loss for both parties simultaneously.
The final game of the series ended in a draw.
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2. Evening Quartet, or: Stars Standing Side by Side
The four of them left Gaming Galaxy after the conclusion of their five-game series, made their way through the restaurant district, and found their seats at a creative cuisine establishment tucked into one of its quieter corners.
The draw: a dish called the Stardust Fondue — fresh space vegetables and select grilled meats, dipped into a glowing blue fermented-cheese-and-herb sauce that the establishment claimed to have invented. The visual alone was worth the visit.
Before Shutia could register any of that, however, she was doing quiet internal arithmetic about the seating arrangement, and arriving at a conclusion that filled her with feelings she could not readily name.
Ledea and Asphi on one side. Shutia and Kanoa across from them.
Exactly the same configuration as last time. The worst possible distribution. The best possible nightmare.
(Why — why is sis next to Asphi again?! I wanted to sit beside sis and do the feeding thing and everything—!)
She swallowed it. She managed it. Kanoa, seated to her left, had both hands locked around Shutia's arm and showed no signs of releasing it under any circumstances, which provided a certain amount of structural support.
Across the table, Ledea was saying something pleasant to Asphi about the aroma of the Stardust sauce and looking, in the process, like she was having an entirely good time. Shutia maintained a poker face with considerable effort and looked down at the red hair tucked against her arm.
"Um — Kanoa? You'd rather be next to Asphi, wouldn't you? Your big sister? We could swap seats — I wouldn't mind—"
She was attempting to recover her position. Kanoa's grip on her arm tightened.
"...no. this arrangement is fine."
"But — are you sure—"
"asphi isn't going to ledea. and shutia is mine right now."
Flat delivery. Absolute conviction.
Across the table, Ledea caught the end of this and looked at Kanoa over a piece of vegetable trailing blue sauce, a small and thoroughly undefeated smile appearing on her face.
"Hmm, Kanoa. I'll note that I have no intention whatsoever of becoming Asphi's little sister. However — in a few years, once I've grown into exactly the kind of poised and elegant adult woman I intend to become — I'll be standing beside Asphi with no question of comparison between us, and you can watch that development from a distance."
She straightened her spine with evident self-satisfaction.
Kanoa looked at her. At the hundred and forty centimeters. At the proportions involved. At the current trajectory.
"...that's my line. little big sister, honestly, today wasn't entirely bad. i was winning by the end of that last game, really — i'm only calling it a draw as an act of generosity on my part."
"I beg your pardon? No act of generosity occurred and none was necessary — I was the one who reached the Core first, and the draw I granted you was an act of munificence from me to you. Don't invent history."
"you're the one rewriting it. ...next time, i won't lose."
The sparks crossed the table again. Ledea and Kanoa re-engaged, visually, with the energy of people who had been doing this all day and had not lost any conviction.
Asphi rested her cheek on one hand and applied herb sauce to a piece of bread with her other. "Ahahaha — honestly, you two are such wonderful rivals~"
Shutia, who had been recording the last thirty seconds of Ledea's competitive expression on her device, lowered it with the expression of someone made deeply and permanently happy by the world.
Then she looked up.
"Oh, sis — what happened with the cheating thing? The Asphi shopping date bet?"
"It was not cheating — and the bet is null. The match was a draw, so the terms don't apply."
"next time i'll beat you properly."
"Looking forward to it~"
The light of distant stars came in through the restaurant's wide windows, fractured into soft colors across the table.
Four people, one table, more noise than any of them strictly needed. A lopsided and slightly chaotic warmth that didn't quite fit any conventional description of how an evening should go.
It lasted until well past dark, and not one of them suggested ending it.