I never managed to fall asleep. Too much was going on in the back of my mind to allow me to rest. I passed the time by engraving the reassuring presence of Lily and Colette deep within my heart.

I didn’t think it was a waste to spend the night like this. The Alfonse Lockengard from a week ago would have scoffed and insisted that I needed to spend every second analyzing information about Violent Evergarden, but I was no longer that Alfonse. My experiences in Evergarden changed me.

Colette woke up with a start. I gave her hand a reassuring squeeze and that seemed to calm her down. The night had passed without incident. Colette froze when she realized that. It took a few minutes for her to restart. That morning, she was smiling happily as she followed Lily out for a morning jog.

I found a deserted, small park and sat down on a rather hidden bench. I had come to a decision after spending the entire night thinking.

I wasn’t going to abandon Mom and Dad in Terra to live as a Magical Girl in Evergarden. The Dawn Princess Regalia was an endgame piece of equipment that combined the might of a Pilot with a Valkyrie, the only two paths I could take if I did not want to be a Magical Girl. I didn’t have a Saint Mark or a Cursed Mark, but I could always acquire one later down the road.

“Sorry, Beta. I am not going to wait for you or that ‘thieving cat’ to decide my fate for me.”

The blue and gold Regalia easily slipped over my left wrist. A click echoed in my mind and all of a sudden, my senses expanded. I took in a breath of air and exhaled, marveling at the feeling of being alive.

The words others used to describe owning a Regalia did not do it justice. It was like I was an incomplete existence that suddenly became whole. The Dawn Princess Regalia was a part of me just as much as my hand was and it operated instinctively in the same way.

Complex calculations ran through the computational area of the Regalia.  Dawn Princess sucked the materials stored in the secondary dimension to materialize a coin in my hand. There was nothing magical about it. On an instinctive level, I understood the exact scientific process that went into the coin’s creation.

I couldn’t believe my eyes, but even my sense of touch said that the coin I created was real. I flipped it up in the air a few times to test it before I deconstructed my creation.

The components of the coin returned to their original locations in Dawn Princess’ secondary dimension. This was the power of a Pilot, the creation of weapons and structures that could be used to fight the invading Demons.

Unlike a Magical Girl or a Valkyrie, a Regalia was a power that operated purely on science. I had the delusion that if Terra was given enough time to advance, we would eventually have created something similar to a Regalia.

I was only a rank F Pilot, the weakest of the weakest. What I could create was limited to simple schematics like guns, blades, or clothing with anti-magic properties.

The Witch Mark on my chest heated up. A moment later, my mind was connected to a hot, live wire as it touched something unfathomable. It was like introducing complex numbers to an ant that lived in a world of integers.

Dawn Princess’ computational area was torn to shreds. I wanted to scream in pain, but my body didn’t respond. The white hot heat ravaged both Dawn Princess and I as it formed connections a mere Rank F Pilot was never meant to handle. It was an exquisite type of pain I had never experienced before, as if the vague notion of my previously imperceptible soul was set on fire.

I mentally lunged at anything that might make it stop and my vision went pure white. The pain didn’t stop, even when I returned to Terra as Alfonse Lockengard. Logging out of Violent Evergarden briefly restored me to full health, before the white hot flame burned me once more.

I did the only thing I could do. I logged back in. My momentary reprieve lasted for a second before the pain became too much. I logged out. I logged back in. Every few seconds, I shifted from one world to the next. The clearly defined lines between the two blurred.

Fantasy and science clashed. Magic and antimagic wove together in an incomprehensible pattern. Time stretched on forever.

I collapsed in a pool of sweat in my room in Terra with a scarlet and gold Dawn Princess on my wrist. With a thought, the Regalia’s form hid itself in the secondary dimension as it struggled to repair itself. My chest heaved up and down as I fought to bring my breathing under control.

“W-What the hell?”

I wondered out loud. Dawn Princess was only supposed to link with a Saint Mark or a Cursed Mark. I had neither and I wasn’t a Valkyrie. I rubbed my eyes to clear my blurred vision, but it was useless. I took off my glasses and the world snapped into crystal clear clarity. A thought crossed my mind and I ran into the bathroom and stripped.

Outwardly, I appeared the exact same as usual minus one thing. The bright red Witch Mark on my chest was gone. Color drained from my face.

“No, no, no. This can’t be happening.”

I put my clothes back on and raced into my room. I snatched up my phone and hastily scrolled through my apps, but the Hexennacht app was gone. I painstakingly waited for my computer to boot up, but the results disappointed me. The Hexennacht app was gone on my computer too.

I collapsed into my gaming chair. Panic began to overwhelm me. I couldn’t log into Evergarden without the Hexennacht app. Magical Girls lost the ability to return to Terra because forming a contract with a Spirit erased their Witch Mark. Now the same had happened to me, except I was on Terra with a Regalia.

My mind linked with the slumbering Dawn Princess and suddenly, a bright red screen appeared in my vision. My hand passed right through the screen when I tried touching it. I calmed myself and examined the screen in detail.

It was like I had opened the Hexennacht app in my mind. All the features I used in the Hexennacht app on my phone could be accessed with a single thought. I sent a command and a moment later, I logged into Violent Evergarden as Alice. With another thought, I was back in Terra as Alfonse.

The Hexennacht app was like a big black box sitting in the calculation area of Dawn Princess. I didn’t understand how it worked at all. Fusing with the Witch Mark had damaged Dawn Princess to the point where it had less than 5% of its original strength. Even so, the current Dawn Princess was far stronger than Terra’s strongest computers.

Reloging to Terra had cleared away my sweat, but I still made my way to the bathroom with a fresh change of clothes. I hadn’t showered ever since the first day of Violent Evergarden because relogging took care of everything.

I overwrote the fresh, painful memories of equipping the Dawn Princess with a long, hot shower. I emerged from it feeling more like a human than I had this past week. As I padded down the carpeted stairs barefoot, I allowed Dawn Princess to whirl to life and pop up several red screens in the corner of my vision.

A smile grew on my face as I found a way to put my schooling to use that was previously thought impossible. A Regalia ran in a very similar way to a computer and my intuitive connection with it allowed me to program commands into it.

For example, I wrote a program for Dawn Princess to save a copy of every single post on the forums and then instructed it to periodically poll the forums to make sure it was always up to date.

I had Dawn Princess open up an instance of the Hexennacht app for every player that had ever streamed their perspective in Violent Evergarden, made a copy of their footage, and then ran a script to analyze that data for any footage of Sariel.

I could instantly recall any data stored in Dawn Princess’ memory. This didn’t magically allow me to know everything. I would still need to search for what I wanted, but that ability alone put me far ahead of the rest of the world.

Sariel had inadvertently been caught on a stream yesterday, by Gray of all people. She only appeared for a brief moment in a crowd of people, but I knew it was her when I saw her. Beta wasn’t lying to me. She was in good health. My little sister was safe.

Dad had fallen asleep on the sofa with his laptop. Now that I got a good look at him, I realized that he was a mess. His hair was disheveled and he had not shaved in days. His skin was pasty white and he didn’t look like he had been eating properly.

I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t thrown out the burden of saving the world. We had been living together all this time, but I never properly looked at him. I had assumed he was an unbreakable rock, but in the end he was human just like me.

“Dad, wake up.”

I shook him by the shoulder. After a few tries, he groaned and opened his eyes.

“Al?”

“You shouldn’t sleep on the sofa, Dad. You need to get some proper rest in bed.”

“I can’t. Sariel needs me...”

Dad picked up his laptop and went straight back to searching for Sariel. I snatched the laptop from his hands and went to the exact moment when my little sister appeared on Gray’s stream.

“I found her Dad. This is Sariel.”

I pointed to a girl in the crowd.

“This is..?”

Dad was understandably uncertain. The girl in the crowd had snow white hair and sky blue eyes, unlike our Sariel who shared the same brown hair and brown eyes as me. Her appearance was also more beautiful and refined, but Sariel’s original traits were still present.

Dad enlarged the image of Sariel and gazed at it in disbelief. His hand stretched out and touched the screen as if hoping he could stretch across dimensions and reach his daughter. Fresh tears spilled down his face.

“Good. It is so good that you are okay, Sariel.”

I gave Dad a side hug as he cried in relief at Sariel’s safety. As he did, I discreetly glanced at the flower ornament in Sariel’s hair. As I suspected, Sariel had challenged the World Tree dungeon just like Beta. The World Flower in her hair was wilted and lifeless just like Beta’s was before she caught sight of me.

“Al, there is something I need to tell you.”

Dad eventually calmed down. His face remained grim, even with news of Sariel’s safety. A bad feeling welled up in my heart.

“What is it?”

“I haven’t been able to reach your Mom since last night. All of my calls are going straight to voicemail.”

Mom had been asking around Witch Hunt Headquarters for news about Sariel. Her sudden silence meant that something had gone wrong.

“I’m heading to Italia to check on her in person–”

I spoke up to interrupt Dad.

“Great, when are we going?”

Dad looked at me like I had suddenly turned into another person. I had hardly stepped outside in the past month. It was hard to imagine me wanting to travel across the world. Even so, Mom’s safety was more important than anything else.

“You want to go?”

“That is right. Please book a ticket for me too. I am just as worried about Mom as you are.”

“I-I’ll do that. The flight heads out this evening and I’ll have three return tickets for us to return early Monday morning.”

I nodded my head to show that I agreed. That worked out perfectly for me. I could attend classes as Alice and then spend the weekend in Terra. We would hopefully be back in time for Alice to make her appearance at Saint Freya Academy on Monday. Nobody would notice anything wrong.

I made sure Dad got some sleep in a real bed before I finished my breakfast and logged into Evergarden. Beta had said that Yggdrasil would give an announcement today. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what far reaching consequences that might have.