“Are you sure this thing can hold all of our weight?” Emily asked, grimacing as Ansel tried to squeeze in beside her.

  “It was built by the Mercury Riders, so I imagine so,” Michiko responded flatly. She was pinned in the corner of the elevator, cigarette in one hand, Pink Dragon wand in the other, watching as Ansel finally managed to contort himself fully inside.

  “The Mercury Riders?” Lachlan giggled, his voice rising a nervous octave. “Emily, don’t tell me that—”

  Whatever Lachlan was about to say was cut off with a shrill scream as the elevator plummeted downward. Emily was suddenly acutely aware of Lachlan’s hangover and his Midwestern ability to vomit multiple times over the course of twenty-four hours, but it seemed that his vocal cords had more important things to do than acting as a passageway for last night’s karaage.

  The elevator slowed, then lurched forward with speed, pressing the five bodies and Miss Yama together.

  “It’s going to be all right!” Emily shouted, as Michelle’s scream joined Lachlan’s yowl and Ansel’s deep groan and they shot past lights on either side of the tunnel.

  There was a shuddering deceleration; the doors of the elevator slid open, and Emily and her four friends spilled out in a pile. Even Michiko was wide-eyed, though maybe that was on account of having the air squeezed out of her lungs in the corner of the lift. Only Miss Yama seemed untroubled, bounding ahead in the tunnel’s glowing light with an excited series of yowls.

  Gasping, Michelle turned to Emily.

  “What. Was. That?”

  Emily grabbed her friend’s arm, pulling her along deeper into the tunnel.

  “Just, come with me. It’ll make sense when you see it,” Emily replied, though she wondered if that statement was actually true.

  It took some shepherding, but soon they were stumbling down the hall together, into the pink glow of the tunnel’s overhead lights, toward the darkness ahead. Emily had thought it would be easier with her friends there, but it was almost more terrifying. Maybe because it feels more real, she realized.

  Ansel was the first out of the tunnel, pink light blooming all around him. He craned his large head backward, gaping at the sight that greeted him. Then came Lachlan, stumbling, who, after taking one vertiginous glance at the Pink Dragon, vomited over the side of the railing into the darkness below. Then Michelle, wide-eyed and gasping, with Emily by her side, and finally Michiko, lighting another cigarette with a trembling hand.

  “What is that?” Michelle asked after several gasping seconds, her voice shaking as she gazed up at the massive mech.

  “It’s Pink Dragon,” Emily answered, her voice only slightly quivering as she squeezed her friend’s hand.

  Ansel was the first to move. He took a careful step forward, then another. His mouth opened, then closed again, as if language had failed him entirely. He leaned over the railing and touched the gleaming metal of Pink Dragon’s thigh.

  This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work.

  “Schei?e,” he said finally, very quietly, “This is not a prop.”

  “No shit,” Lachlan muttered weakly, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve.

  Michelle gave a bark of incredulous laughter. “Right. Okay. So, either I’m having the most lucid dream of my lift life, or—” She gestured helplessly upward. “—that thing is real.”

  From behind them, Michiko flatly said, “It’s real.”

  Emily swallowed. “This is where the Dragons are kept. All of them. Pink Dragon is hers.” She glanced at Michiko. “The others are out there,” she said, gesturing into the cavern’s darkness.

  “Others,” Lachlan repeated faintly.

  Emily forced the words out, afraid that if she hesitated any longer she’d lose her nerve. “Michiko told me that Queen Nebulon is on her way. She’s already defeated everyone else. The Jupiter Conclave. The Neptune Corps. There’s no one left to stop her.”

  Lachlan stared at Emily. “You’re saying the villain from a cancelled ’90s tokusatsu show is about to invade Earth?” He chuckled faintly. “And, let me guess… Michiko wants us to pilot the dragons?”

  “Not me. I just wanted to show someone, after all these years. She wants us to pilot them,” Michiko said, gesturing at Emily.

  “Because if we don’t, the world ends!” Emily cried. She turned to her German friend. “Ansel, you remember Queen Nebulon? What she did on Xeras Prime? We can’t let that happen here!”

  Ansel closed his eyes tightly, blinking rapidly when he opened them. No, this isn’t a dream, my friend, Emily thought as she watched him turn his gaze back upward. His mouth was hard when he turned back to Emily. Michelle and Lachlan didn’t fully grasp Emily’s warning: Space Dragons was still just a dumb show in their minds, even if it had become terribly real. Ansel, though, he understood. He had been a fan of the show, if not an otaku like Emily. He knew what an invasion by Nebulon meant.

  “This is insane,” he breathed. “Impossible. But you’re right. We can’t let that happen.” He glanced between Michiko and Emily. “What do we do?”

  Michiko didn’t answer immediately. She lit another cigarette with trembling hands, and took a long drag, the smoke rising around her like a veil. “I give you a wand. You interface… or try to, at least. You fight. You feel things no human should feel. You risk dying. In fact, you will probably die.” She took another long drag. “And if you survive, you spend the rest of your life knowing exactly how small you are, and that no one on earth will understand what just happened to you, or believe you if you try to tell them.”

  We’ll see about that, Emily thought. However, this didn’t feel like the right time to argue about the pros and cons of landing a dragon in the center of Tokyo when this was all over.

  With a weary sigh, Michiko reached into the plastic bag and pulled out a new wand, this one white.

  A harsh light erupted in the far corner of the cavern, perhaps a kilometer from where they stood.

  White Dragon. The mech looked huge even from this distance, easily twice the size of Pink Dragon. It had been the tank of the group, Emily remembered, able to take a direct plasma-beam shot against its shield with barely a dent.

  Emily hadn’t noticed it at first, but the narrow metal walkway beside Pink Dragon extended farther than the platform they stood on, branching outward toward the center of the cavern. Dim guide-lights were turning on, tracing its length before being swallowed by the darkness beyond Pink Dragon’s glow.

  One by one, Michiko pulled the remaining three wands from the plastic bag, and one by one, massive shapes revealed themselves in the distant dark, until five light-bound dragons flared at five points around the cavern, evenly spaced like the points of a vast circle, blue, red, and green joining pink and white.

  It felt like something shifted in the cavern’s air, a resonant hum vibrating through the metal beneath their feet.

  “I should really be studying,” Michelle whispered to herself.