And when Makoto absorbed the… thing… then she… walking bankvault…
—
So far, Kaneshiro’s palace had been all gold floors, fake luxury, floating vaults, and ATMs that looked like they had learned extortion from a bad crime drama. The whole place smelled like hot metal, cheap cologne, and the kind of confidence only a man with stolen money could afford.
By the time they reached the end, Joker had already decided that he never wanted to hear the word “interest” again.
Unfortunately, Shadow Kaneshiro disagreed.
“PAY UP, LOSERS!”
The roar came from inside the massive silver machine shaking the center of the arena. Piggytron towered over the Phantom Thieves like someone had taken a piggy bank, fed it every crime in Tokyo, and attached weapons to everything that looked vaguely round. Its huge metal body gleamed under the palace lights, its snout vents belching smoke, its stubby mechanical legs stomping hard enough to make gold coins bounce across the floor.
Then the missile ports opened.
“Scatter!” Joker shouted.
The team broke apart as a storm of missiles screamed toward them. Ryuji dove behind a cracked pillar of stacked coins, Ann rolled beneath a laser line that carved a glowing scar across the floor, and Morgana barely avoided being punted by a stray chunk of gold plating. Makoto slid beside Joker, slammed one fist into the ground, and summoned Johanna just long enough to blast two missiles out of the air before they reached him.
The explosion knocked both of them backward anyway.
Joker hit the floor shoulder-first and rolled. His ears rang. His coat dragged through scattered coins, and for one uncomfortable second, he imagined Kaneshiro charging him for the damage.
Makoto was already pushing herself back up, breathing hard but steady. “His attack pattern is changing. He is trying to force us into the center.”
“Yeah, I noticed!” Ryuji kicked a coin away from his boot while another laser swept over his head. “Mostly because the center keeps exploding!”
Piggytron’s snout rotated with a heavy metallic clunk. Kaneshiro’s distorted voice crackled from the speakers, high with anger and greed. “Run all you want! You little brats are still in my bank! Every step you take costs money!”
“That is not how banks work!” Makoto snapped, even as she grabbed Joker by the sleeve and pulled him away from a second missile barrage.
Ann cracked her whip at one of the exposed side panels, but Piggytron’s armor folded shut before the strike could connect. “I hate that he made the rules so wrong and still sounds smug about it.”
“Focus!” Morgana shouted from near the edge of the arena, tail puffed and sword raised. “If we keep dodging forever, we’ll run out of room before he runs out of ammunition!”
Piggytron answered by tucking its stubby legs beneath its body. Its snout folded inward with a heavy metallic clunk, armor plates sliding over it until the whole machine became less like a pig and more like a giant silver ball with bad financial intentions. It's entire body screamed as it built momentum, grinding sparks against the floor while the arena trembled under the coming charge.
Joker had seen that posture twice already.
It was going to Rollout.
“Move!” he called.
The machine launched forward like a silver wrecking ball avalanche. Its body tore through the arena, crushing coin pillars, shattering railings, and leaving a trench of twisted metal behind it. Joker sprinted left, Ann and Morgana broke right, and Ryuji grabbed a broken signpost to swing himself out of the way at the last second.
Makoto made it clear too, but only barely. Piggytron scraped past her with enough force to rip loose the edge of her sleeve and send her skidding backward.
She caught herself with one hand on the floor and looked at the torn fabric with an expression that was not fear, exactly.
It was thought. A blooming idea.
“Don’t tell me you’re getting ideas,” Ryuji said, already recognizing the look while he hauled Morgana away from a smoking crater.
Makoto stood, brushed gold dust off her glove, and reached toward the small pouch at her belt. “I am getting one idea.”
“Alright, god knows we need it. It better better be a good one then!”
Joker turned toward her as Piggytron smashed into the far wall and began its heavy, grinding turn back around. Makoto pulled out the Will Seed amulet they had restored in the palace, its blue frame shaped like twisted amalgamation of three skulls. It looked less like treasure and more like something a loan shark would wear to a wedding to show off how bad he was.
Morgana’s eyes widened. “Queen, are you thinking of using that now?”
“The skill attached to it should provide a strong defensive barrier,” Makoto said, lifting the amulet while the arena trembled beneath Piggytron’s turning wheels. “If I can draw the next rollout and endure the impact, the rest of you can attack while he is recovering.”
Ryuji stared at her. “You wanna get hit by the giant murder pig on purpose?”
“You wanted an opening, right.” Makoto’s voice stayed calm, but she was already moving, stepping toward the center before anyone could stop her. “And I want to be useful. Our interests aline once again.”
Ann sprinted after her, ducking under another burst of coin-shaped bullets. “Makoto, I like the part where we don’t let Kaneshiro flatten you.”
“That is why I’m using the amulet.” Makoto raised it to her chest as Piggytron’s engines roared again. “Mona, it is purified, correct?”
Morgana hesitated only long enough to make Joker deeply uncomfortable. “It should be! The Will Seeds became a legitimate accessory once they were restored. I think.”
“You think?” Ann repeated.
"We have used one before, remember. It should be fine!"
Makoto closed her fingers around the amulet anyway. “Then I’ll trust it.”
The gem flared.
Gold light spilled between her fingers and ran down her arm in thin, bright lines. For a moment it looked like molten coins had become veins beneath her glove, tracing her wrist, her shoulder, then the outline of her mask. Her boots scraped against the floor as a heavy aura pressed around her, not soft like healing magic, but dense and metallic, as if the air itself had become armor.
Joker took half a step toward her. “Queen?”
Makoto inhaled sharply.
Then the light dimmed.
Nothing else happened.
The amulet sat in her palm, ordinary and dull. The golden veins vanished from her skin. Her stance remained ready, but her expression tightened with the particular irritation of a student who had followed every instruction and still gotten a wrong answer from the textbook.
“That’s it?” Ryuji shouted from behind a fallen ATM statue.
“Maybe the barrier is invisible!” Morgana said.
“That is not comforting when the attack is very visible!”
Piggytron’s screached around the corner.
Makoto looked up one heartbeat too late.
The silver machine came rolling straight at her, faster than before, its whole body turning into a blur of greed and grinding metal. Joker lunged, but the floor cracked beneath his foot and stole the angle from him. Ann’s whip snapped out and missed Makoto’s wrist by inches. Morgana yelled something that disappeared beneath the roar.
Piggytron hit.
The impact shook the entire vault.
Coins burst upward like a glittering wave. The machine rolled over the center of the arena, slammed through a row of fake bank counters, and ground to a halt near the far wall. Smoke poured from its vents. The lights flickered. For several seconds, the only sound was Kaneshiro laughing inside the cockpit.
“HA! HAHAHA! That’s what happens when you default on your life!”
Joker pushed himself upright, heart hammering. He looked toward the center of the arena, where Makoto had been standing, but there was only a crushed trail of gold dust and broken tile.
Ryuji’s face went pale. “No way.”
Ann took one step forward, whip hanging loose in her hand. “Makoto…?”
Kaneshiro’s laughter grew louder, filling the arena through Piggytron’s speakers. “You see that? That’s the power of money! It flatten everything that gets in my way! Friends, justice, stupid little student council girls—”
A deep metallic groan cut him off.
Piggytron twitched.
Not forward. Not backward. Its whole body shuddered from the inside, armor plates lifting and settling like something beneath them had stretched. Kaneshiro made a strangled noise over the speakers, followed by the frantic clatter of controls being slapped.
“What? Move! Move, damn it!”
The machine did not move.
Instead, the lets almost looked like they stiffen and locked in place.
Gold sparks burst from the joints. The side plating buckled outward, then smoothed itself back down in a slow ripple that traveled across the machine’s body. The pig snout twisted with a horrible squeal of reshaping metal, flattening and folding, almost as if it was going into phase two and transforming into something entirely different at that very moment.
Morgana lowered his sword slightly. “That is not an invisible barrier.”
“No kidding!” Ryuji grabbed him by the scarf and dragged him away as one of Piggytron’s stubby legs punched down into the floor and began to lengthen. “Why is the pig growing knees?”
The whole machine rose. Its squat legs stretched into long armored limbs, heavy and powerful, each one ending in broad mechanical hooves that crushed the floor beneath them. The what looked like eyes along its sides slid upward, rearranging themselves into massive circular hip guards that spun with bank-lock clicks. Pipes split, cables braided together, and silver plating flowed over steel like a second skin.
Kaneshiro screamed from inside the cockpit. “Stop! I bought you! I own you! This is premium hardware!”
The cockpit glass fogged from within.
Then a something akin to a fist slammed against it, making him scurry into the back of the cockpit.
Not Kaneshiro’s fist. Too large. The glass bulged outward as something pushed up from the top of Piggytron’s body, first like a rising cannon, then like a horn, then like a shoulder forcing its way through a roof that had never been built for it. Metal stretched upward in a smooth, impossible column, shaping itself into a torso of polished steel and silver-trimmed armor.
Joker watched, unable to decide whether to run closer or very much farther away.
An arm formed next, long and powerful, its fingers flexing with the hiss of pistons. Then another. The shoulders drew wider. A head lifted from the reshaping metal, face smooth at first, then sharpening into familiar lines beneath a mask-like crest. Dark metal hair fell in segmented plates around the new figure’s face, each piece clicking into place like the links of a chain.
Makoto’s thief outfit manifested over the upper body in pieces of black and white fabric layered with armored silver, less like normal clothing and more like the palace had tried to turn her uniform into part of her now very metallic body. Her scarf snapped into existence around her neck, blown by hot exhaust and the pressure of her own rising mass.
Ann stared upward. “Is that… Makoto?”
Ryuji pointed weakly with one hand. “That’s Makoto attached to the weird pig mecha.”
“Technically,” Morgana said, because apparently survival instincts could not defeat being Morgana, “the boss appears to be attached to her now.”
The newly formed giant opened her eyes. Her now giant red glowing eyes.
The arena lights reflected in them like coin slots under glass.
Kaneshiro’s voice crackled again, smaller now and much less certain. “H-Hey! Piggytron! Override! Manual control! Crush them! Crush all of them!”
The massive figure looked down. Her lower body was still Piggytron, but transformed into something grander and far more imposing: a four-legged armored vault-beast of silver and steel, with missile ports along its flanks and the old cockpit buried in her lower half below a glowing lock-shaped core.
She placed one huge metal hand over that cockpit. You could hear a panicked very un-manly scream from within her body just then.
Kaneshiro was inside, sitting at the controls with both hands frozen over the levers. He looked very small now. He also looked like a man who had just realized that his expensive car had legally changed owners while he was still sitting in it.
Makoto’s voice came through her mouth, the speakers, and the vault walls at the same time.
“I am Makototron.”
The name struck the arena with enough authority that even the smoke seemed to pause.
Ryuji slowly turned toward Joker. “Did she just name herself?”
Joker did not answer. He was busy trying to accept that the answer was yes, and that somehow the name worked.
Makototron’s fingers curled around the cockpit frame. “I am the vault of this bank. The money moves when I decide it moves.”
Kaneshiro slammed both fists onto the controls. “No! No, no, no! I’m the boss here! I have the money!”
“All you have are stolen assets,” Makototron said, calm and absolute. Her lower body shifted, mechanical hooves grinding deep circles into the arena floor as she turned away from the wall. “Those assets are now frozen.”
Ann’s mouth twitched despite everything. “Is it weird to say that this is exactly how I always imagined a Makoto robot would talk?”
“It is still Makoto,” Morgana said, then watched one of Makototron’s legs stomp with enough force to fling three coin pillars aside. “Just… with additional upgrades? I think.”
Kaneshiro scrambled at the cockpit door, but the door had become less of an exit and more of a decorative seam in Makototron’s armored chest. “You can’t freeze my money! You can’t freeze me! I’m Kaneshiro! I am the one who...!”
Makototron tilted her head. It was a small motion for her upper body, but the massive Piggytron frame moved with it, hydraulics hissing as if the entire bank had sighed.
“As of now, your account's assets have been confiscated.”
A panel opened beneath the cockpit.
Kaneshiro looked down. “What account...?”
A metal hand reached in, pinched him by the back of his collar, and pulled him out of his own machine like a badly filed receipt. His legs kicked at empty air while the cockpit sealed behind him with a clean vault-click.
Makototron held him up to eye level.
“Your won't ever pay with other peoples money ever again.”
Then she threw him.
Kaneshiro sailed across the arena, bounced off a pile of gold bars, and hit the floor with a pathetic squeak. His biggest coin he had on him rolled away from him, spinning in a circle until Ryuji stopped it with his boot.
Ryuji looked down at it, then at Makototron. “So, uh… are we still fighting the pig mech?”
Makototron’s lower body stepped forward. The whole arena shook under the weight. “No.”
Kaneshiro pushed himself up, shaking with fury. “Don’t you look down on me! I’ll buy you too! I’ll buy all of you! I’ll buy this whole stupid city if I have to!”
Makototron’s massive lower body shifted. Her long armored legs tucked beneath her, folding inward with a series of heavy, deliberate clicks until the Piggytron frame hunched low like it was preparing for another Rollout. But this time she did not charge. Her red eyes brightened instead, glowing hotter through the smoke as a strangely human smile touched her metallic face.
“But you need money for that, don’t you?” she asked.
For a second, she sounded more like Makoto than the vault-speaker voice from before. Less machine. More girl. More knowingly annoyed student council president who had just caught someone making the worst financial argument possible.
Then hatches opened across the back of her Piggytron body.
Kaneshiro looked up. “Wait.”
“And while I never intended to pay you back before,” Makototron said, the hatches locking into place with a sound like safes being cracked open in reverse, “now you look like you are really going to need it.”
Something heavy launched from her back.
A gold bar sailed through the air, spinning end over end before it smashed into the floor beside Kaneshiro hard enough to punch a crater through the tiles. Then another followed. Then another. Within seconds, the back of Makototron’s armored body erupted into a glittering artillery barrage, tons upon tons of solid gold bars launching in perfect arcs straight toward him.
Kaneshiro screamed and tried to run.
Makototron smiled wider.
“I guess all I can do now,” she said, raising one hand as the vault lights flared behind her, “is MAKE IT RAIN!”
The gold came down.
It hit with the force of falling bricks, except every brick was worth more than Kaneshiro’s dignity and much less useful to him at that exact moment. Bars slammed around him, over him, beside him, piling higher and higher as his screaming disappeared beneath the metallic thunder. The arena shook with every impact until the center of the bank had become a fresh mountain of stolen wealth with one tiny, miserable loan shark buried somewhere underneath it.
One final gold bar dropped from above and landed perfectly on top of the pile.
A certificate fluttered down after it.
It landed against the front of the golden mound, crisp and official, stamped in red ink with the words: DEBT PAID IN FULL.
Makototron looked toward Joker.
There was something knowing in her expression, like she was fully aware that this was excessive, ridiculous, and still technically correct.
Then—
“Stop.”
The word cut through the memory like a knife through film.
The golden arena vanished.
The smell of smoke, metal, and hot coins disappeared with it, replaced by disinfectant, stale air, and the faint electric buzz of an interrogation room light.
Joker sat at the metal table, bruised, exhausted, and suddenly very aware that his wrists hurt.
Across from him, Sae Niijima held her pen above her notes. She had stopped writing several seconds ago. Her expression was controlled in the way a cracking dam was controlled.
“One of your comrades,” she said slowly, “fused with a robot?”
Joker looked down at the table.
The memory was still there. Piggytron’s massive frame. Makoto’s voice through the speakers. Kaneshiro being removed from the cockpit like a bad invoice. It all felt vivid, clean, and real in the way dreams sometimes became more convincing after waking up.
“It was more of a piggybank,” he said.
Sae stared at him.
Joker immediately understood that this had not improved the statement.
“A piggybank,” she repeated.
“Maybe,” Joker corrected, then regretted that too.
Sae set her pen down with careful precision. “You are telling me that one of your teamates became a giant mechanical vault queen during the Kaneshiro incident.”
Joker considered the safest possible answer.
Unfortunately, the safest possible answer seemed to be silence, and silence was difficult when Sae Niijima was looking at him like she had personally discovered the concept of contempt.
“That is how I remember it,” he said at last. "At least I think so..."
Sae leaned back in her chair. Her gaze did not soften. If anything, it sharpened, because this was no longer merely a ridiculous statement about a Phantom Thief. This was a ridiculous statement about, and she was almost 100% sure on that, her own sister, Makoto.
“So your friend,” Sae said, “who holds the title of student council president, became an enormous armored machine and declared herself the vault of a criminal bank.”
Joker nodded before he could stop himself.
Sae closed her eyes.
For one brief moment, Joker wondered if she was imagining it too. Not because she believed him. Definitely not because she believed him. More because anyone who knew Makoto well enough could probably picture her saying something like “your assets are frozen” with absolute seriousness.
Sae opened her eyes again. “And you expect me to accept this as testimony?”
Joker looked at his own reflection in the table. The memory was already starting to wobble at the edges. Maybe Makoto had used a defensive skill. Maybe Piggytron had malfunctioned. Maybe the finishing attack had simply looked like Makoto taking command of the battlefield, and his exhausted brain had turned that into something larger, stranger, and much harder to explain to her sister.
Or maybe, somewhere deep inside his mind, the Will Seeds had taken the truth and polished it into whatever shape his cognition found funniest.
“I’m not sure,” Joker admitted.
Sae’s fingers tightened around the pen again. “You were very sure when you described the robots rather generous assets.”
“...” Joker breathed out, trying not to smile, because smiling in an interrogation room was usually a terrible idea and smiling while explaining that Sae’s sister had become Makototron was probably worse.
Still, the image stayed with him: Makoto towering over Kaneshiro’s empire of cash, calm and furious, turning greed itself into something that obeyed her rules instead of his.
Maybe that part, at least, was true.
Not the giant armored vault body. Probably not the missile barrage. Almost certainly not the PAID IN FULL stamp.
But Makoto taking control of a situation built to make Kaneshiro feel powerless?
That sounded real enough.
Sae looked back down at her notes and wrote exactly one line.
Joker could not read it from where he sat.
He hoped it did not say “mechanical bank sister.”
Sae tapped the pen against the paper. “Continue.”
Joker swallowed.
Because, be it from the drugs or from it having happened for real, he just couldn't get the mechanical frame of Makototron out of his head, no matter what.