Deep in space, Chris's massive spacecraft drifted through the void of a new universe, trekking toward the last promised signature of Nowa's Voidflame. Shin broke the silence while eating his ration. "You know, I remember someone who looked like Nowa, not the name though."
"Virgo… somethin' somethin'," Chris vaguely recalled, still staring ahead at the controls. "But yeah, dunno how the fuck that boy survived back then. Those Equilibrium bastards sure fucking ruined everything. Thank god there's peace now because of what Nowa did. But the method… was fucking insane."
Kai spoke without her usual bravado. "It can't be helped. Those gods ruined our universe too, Aniki and I," she looked at Shin, her big bro briefly before turning ahead in the same direction where the space was. "Survived because of this group." She stifled a laugh, though it came out hollow. "Despite us being twin cambions, you humans took us in."
Chris waved off the sentiment. "It's nothing, we help what we can. We prevent what we can. We free what we can. Thats the name of this fucking group ill tell ya," he smirked proudly. "Crusaders of Liberation."
Kai giggled. "Corny, but cool hehe!"
Chris glanced back, wounded. He, Lancer, and Nowa had named the group together, the first group member before them. "Hey! Have some fuckin respect at the seniors little grimlin!"
Kai drew herself up to her full height and jabbed an accusatory finger at Chris. "Im. am. Not. SMALL!"
Chris grinned. Shin just shook his head in exasperation. Then Chris noticed a dead star far ahead. "Oh, good bitching time. Imma park this thing and siphon some star fuel. stock off the firepower and the generator, juuuust in case my main abilities don't work."
Back at the Misty Lake, chaos reigned.
Reimu, who had been on the ground, shot into the sky in a blur all while in the same motion, unleashed a precise shot of Persuasion needles at the Entity but also phased through, imbedding themselves at the ground, putting distance between herself and the triangular-head entity. She tried activating a boundary gap, a technique Yukari had taught her. But when she wove her hand to create one, nothing registered. The boundary was still severed. The same for Ran but worse, she is a shikigami. Meaning no power unless Yukari returned to normal. A cold sweat broke on Reimu's skin. Her tricks were limited now.
Marisa took off, following behind on her flying broom. She circled in a predator's pattern, and a brilliant "Master Spark" lanced from her Mini-Hakkero, but the triangular-head entity simply phased sideways, the beam vaporizing a patch of lake water harmlessly behind it.
"Quit moving, ya glitchy bastard!" Marisa yelled in frustration.
'This monster is neither a youkai nor a being... this must be something else,' Reimu thought, still hovering as the entity closed in at terrifying speed. She formed a sealing gesture, both hands pressed together as a complex spiritual rune circle flared to life behind her. Then she framed the approaching entity with her fingers, like a camera shutter focusing.
"Dream Sign: Evil-Sealing Circle!"
A gigantic box-shaped sealing barrier materialized, its purification energy caging the creature. The entity's movement halted, its eyes swiveling in all directions as it found itself trapped. She followed up with a barrage of paper charms, hurling them through the barrier's walls, but they, too, phased through the entity's form, leaving no mark. Then it locked onto Reimu's form outside the box. Its body adjusted, as if installing modular stats to counter her specifically. It distorted its own reality and glitched out of the entire technique. The sealing box collapsed on empty space where the entity had been.
"What?!" Her face paled. The entity had already covered the distance and was now in Reimu's space.
"Reimu!" Marisa yelled while still in pursuit, already charging her Mini-Hakkero, but the charge needed time. So she produced vials of bomb and threw it at the entity, which it just spin-swiped upward causing the vials to explode in the air instead of hitting it. "Damn it!" she hissed, maneuvering around the explosive effect.
Its finger formed into a claw and swiped toward Reimu. She parried with her Gohei, hastily deploying a barrier to reinforce the block. But the gohei's purification aspect did nothing to this creature. Reimu gritted her teeth. But its other hand was already a blur, its arm re-forming into a lance aimed at her shoulder.
She tried to evade, her yin-yang orb which had orbited her, hovered uselessly. It couldn't detect the threat to give her an auto block shield let alone call gods to aid her. Frustrated, she yelled at her orbs. "Why isn't it working!"
She couldn't in time, her Fantasy Nature, the Float, should have let her slip away from reality entirely. But the attack still grazed her. A grazing blow, but it landed. Pain flared through her shoulder, she grunted.
In her fury, she snarled, "Back off!" She instantly cast a barrier in front of her and launched it toward the entity and it connected. The impact bought her a moment, she used it to fly backward, putting distance between them. Melee was too risky; she needed a different approach.
"Eat this, freak!" Marisa's charge finally finished. She unleashed a continuous Master Spark, the beam lancing toward the entity, but the triangular creature simply outran it, still pursuing Reimu.
She was a blur of red and white, shooting a barrage of homing ofuda that phased harmlessly through the entity, while zigzagging across the lakeshore as it remained locked onto her, its uncanny smile never wavering. 'Attacks are inconsistently inaccurate on landing on this thing. This is bad, I couldn't use spirit transformation to turn the odds, let alone call upon the gods either, I have no time to chant it, and the surrounding spirit got annihilated too. There must be a way to defeat this thing.'
Sakuya bent down, her arms crossing underneath her as knives materialized between her fingers. Then her arms blurred, unleashing a barrage of thousands of conjured knives, those waves of knives just phased out of its hide upon contact.
She then became a silver streak, dashing in to give a decisive slash. But the entity anticipated her, leaping/glitching straight up and then driving an axe-kick down onto her back with crushing force, slamming her into the ground with a sickening crunch of broken stone and displaced mist. "Gah!" She gritted her teeth in frustration, 'My ability… If only… If only… Damn it…!'
"Sakuya!" Reimu cried out, firing a volley of ofuda and persuasion needles that scattered all around her, the shots aimed at the entity were swatted aside like gnats, the creature not even looking, the rest of other ofuda that didn't land but flew past. Its function to petrify became useless, as it is not registering at all.
Ran, her youkai power still a hollow ache inside her, could only manage a dozen weak bullet attacks that fizzled against the entity's glitching hide.
And on the sidelines, Nowa watched. His eyes were open now, tracking every movement with cold, analytical precision. A single eye slid open onto his left cheek, but the iris is different this time than the last time he opened his extra eyes. He saw through his third eye, the entity having null and glitchy code of its layer one reality, the surface level where all thing exist.
"↑ΓUM⊥∃BM∃3∃B , · M o ∘ U J ∃ ∘ · Σ i ⊥ i D · T Γ ω ∃ , · Φ B o ⊥ o ⊥ A Φ ∃ · B i Γ J i ⊥ i · B Γ Φ Γ ω ω ∃ ∘ ." A code, written in its structure, a language he had yet to know. Its movement is different from what they are fighting on the surface.
But by the looks of it. It is a being that has a different modular code that allows it to bypass most in universe power. The kind of power he knows about and where he excels at. Yet despite that, Reimu, Sakuya, Marisa, Ran, fighting at a disadvantage, unable to perceive the true battlefield, still nearly match it.
"Remarkable." He muttered. But the odds lean on the entity.
His third eye's gaze landed on Reimu. He saw the the "ファンタジーネイチャー(Fantasy Nature)". Despite the language symbol barrier, he knew it as a biological inheritance of a Narrative nature.
'Interesting, her bloodline has that kind of thing too. But this is probably what they are countering against with. Sucks, she is just subconsciously tapping it, not truly controlling it to its fullest. Like my Erasure of… everything.'
He closed his third eye, having seen enough of it already. He let out a disappointed sigh, 'Their combat choreography is good, though they seem to be lacking in meta-awareness and their Meta-user is unaware she has one. They're so bound by their concept of a fair fight, they need to drop it. This "Spell Card" duel, while innovative for social conflict, is crippling them for this Meta-warfare.' He saw Reimu hesitate for a microsecond, lining up a non-lethal capture pattern. He saw Marisa fired to overwhelm, not to kill. 'They're trying to play a game when the opponent has torn up the rulebook.'
A vision of a crucified Reimu and a Nailed down Marisa flashed before his eyes. 'I have seen the future. This is not how it ends. This is just the prelude.'
He settled his will, a judge awaiting the final piece of evidence before passing a death sentence.
'I'll only intervene when that is about to happen. Not a moment sooner.'
"Star magic: Homing Stream!" Marisa fired a volley of homing stars. The entity didn't even dodge; it simply teleported in a glitch of pixels, reappearing directly behind her.
"Wha—" She barely had time to turn her head and maneuver mid-air before its foot connected with her back. But before that, the rune roomba flared its protective hexagon shield screen that negated the kick but not the momentum. The impact sent her flying like a ragdoll into a thick pine tree. The trunk exploded into splinters, and Marisa slumped to the ground, a spray of crimson gushing from her lips.
"Marisa!" Reimu's voice was a raw scream of anguish. All thoughts of offense vanished. She broke her own pattern, rushing to place herself between the entity and her fallen friend, her Gohei held in a shaking, defensive stance.
'Damn it! There must be a way! Think Reimu, think!' Her face was a mask of grim fury. The entity saw the opening. It dashed, a blur of distorted geometry.
An ofuda flared in its path, it is Ran's last, desperate effort. "Get back from her!" She yelled, the entity didn't break stride. It changed course, covering the distance to the powerless kitsune in an instant, she gasped in terror. Her nine tails elongated, forming a protective shield in front of her by pure instinct. But its hand glitched through and clamped around Ran's head. She, in turn, grabbed its hand, her tails dispersing from their protective formation to wrap around it. But before she could complete the grapple, she was lifted in the air, then slammed her face-first into the earth with a sickening thud.
Thwip. A knife buried itself in the entity's back. Sakuya, having dragged herself from the lakeside, had landed a hit. The entity grunted, a sound of annoyance. It spun, its fist driving deep into Sakuya's stomach before she could back off. The air left her lungs in a choked gasp as she was launched backward, skidding across the surface of the water.
Nowa heard the sound from the sideline, 'From the sound of it, It's a hit. So physical attack is better than magic and projectiles. Or it's one of those types of enemies, who hide their hitboxes. The same reasons why the hits are inconsistent.' He scoffed at the idea of it.
Its path now clear, the entity resumed its charge toward the defenseless Reimu.
Sakuya surfaced, drenched and gasping. "Reimu!" she yelled, and in her panic, time froze. It was meant to stop the entity, her ingrained habit of using her signature ability to solve problems, but…
It didn't matter. The entity's fist, moving within the frozen time, connected with Reimu's cheek in a brutal, right-hook punch.
Sakuya's face contorted in despair. "Damn it!" She released time, and Reimu was thrown sideways by the released kinetic energy, landing hard on the ground. She pushed herself up, trembling, wiping a trickle of blood from her split lip.
"Thats it. You're a dead piece of shit." Reimu gritted her teeth, her eyes blazed with cold, defiant fire. She held her ground as the entity's spear-limb lunged. It struck her, and her image exploded into a shower of ofuda. The real Reimu was already behind the being, having used the decoy to buy time. Dozens of ofuda she had pre-placed flared to life, burying the entity in a cage of sacred paper that binds it, then from both of her sides shot out an orbs of light that converged and detonated on contact with the entity in a brilliant, mega purifying explosion. "Spirit trap: Fantasy Seal!"
Marisa and Ran pushed themselves up, hope flaring despite their pained expressions. Reimu watched the epicenter, her breath held.
'Reimu is a more natural contestant at this than I originally thought, after all her inheritance is doing the heavy lifting. These girls' firepower is at the minimum to kill these things...' Nowa mused from the sidelines.
'But...'
From within the smoke, the entity lunged again, a blur aimed directly at Reimu.
Shocked, she yelled, "Only a scratch?!" before she sidestepped, expecting the straightforward attack, only for the strike to phase through her as an illusion.
"Wha—!" Her face contorts into despair.
The real attack came a split-second later from the smoke's edge, a brutal fist that landed squarely in her stomach with a sickening thud that made her grunt. Her Fantasy Nature, her ability to evade reality, was no longer helpful against an entity that was made against reality itself. It was now a liability, something she had subconsciously relied upon that could no longer be trusted.
Before the force could even throw her backward, the entity's other hand had already snapped out, catching her arm in a vice-like grip. With a contemptuous roar, it swung her through the air and slammed her body into the ground with earth-shattering force.
"REIMU!" The cry was a unison of pure horror from Marisa, Ran, and Sakuya.
This was it. The moment was here. Nowa was supposed to stand up and intervene. But he hadn't moved.
'I see… There was a potential here. But... this world is fucked. So why fight for another corpse?' The nihilistic thought was a familiar comfort. 'Why am I always dragged into this? No one saved me when I was a kid running from my exploitative adoptive parents. No one… No one…'
The memory surfaced, not as a thought, but as a full-sensory ghost.
--A cold, damp alley. Himself at twelve, a skeleton wrapped in tattered rags, lying on the hard ground, the gnawing emptiness in his stomach a more certain death than any weapon. The world had faded to gray. Then, a shadow fell over him. A woman with black hair in twin front braids style. She didn't speak. She simply knelt and placed a warm loaf of bread and a potato, wrapped in a paper bag, onto his chest.
He managed to lift his head, his vision blurry. "Why?" The voice was raspy and whispered.
She giggled, "Why? There's no 'why.' innit Although... yeah, there is." Her smile was gentle. "Because of karma. They say the more you help people, the more kindness returns to you. That's what I choose to believe in."
The words karma and return echoed through the hollows of his soul, snapping him back to the present, to the sight of Reimu about to be crushed.
"Karma..." he muttered, "Amy... Kindness..."
He let out a weary sigh, the sound of a man laying down a heavy shield he never wanted to carry again. He stood up, brushing the dirt from his pants as if preparing for a distasteful but necessary chore. The decision was made. Not for a deal, not for a world, but for a debt. A debt of kindness, paid forward.