Mentioned Characters: Marisa

Dressed in green, Marisa seems more like a researcher than ever. Her large glasses are just one of the items she wears that embody her inquisitive nature. Though her passion for research has grown stronger, her obsession with firepower is still as potent as ever.

Behind Marisa stood a silent figure. An ethereal vision, it was doll-like in stillness and form. "An ethereal doll." The phrase carries a strange contradiction. Can a doll become a ghost? Surely not. For what it's worth, Marisa claims to have animated it with mushroom magic.

In many ways, fungi are a fantasy. Even the sciences of the outside world have yet to fully unravel their mysteries. The mushrooms that sprout from the ground are merely the visible tips of an intricate, subterranean network of mycelium―a network that extends not just beneath forests but through all of nature itself. Marisa had made a startling discovery: mushrooms talk to one another.

Mycelium can both stunt and encourage a tree's growth. It can sprout mushrooms that serve as food for wild animals or produce ones so toxic they become lethal. Mushrooms nurture, guide, and control nature as if each one were the realization of a dream envisioned by the mycelial network. Since they share the same environment as mushrooms, humans may simply be one of those dreams. If that's the case, then what we call fate might just be the will of mushrooms.

Stars light the sky, forever out of reach, no matter how deeply you yearn for them. Although perhaps, like mushrooms, stars are also manifestations of a vast network―in this case, the universe. On a night when stars rained down from the heavens, Marisa was happily continuing her research when she was ambushed. But her foe posed her no threat. "Would you look at that. My research subject has just grown legs and walked right up to me." Battles of bullets are nothing more than a part of her research. Marisa never stops. It's almost as if she can't―as if she were made not to. She turned to her companion, and with a smile, she said, "Let tonight's research begin."