Nowa settled his hand onto the gun holstered by his side, unlatched its safety harness. But he hesitated on using it. 'My bullet will obliterate the landscape if I unleashed my gun technique here…' He let out a frustrated sigh. 'I will get in trouble if this lake disappears rather than leaving a crater.'
He latched the harness back and settled into a low stance, his feet digging into the earth. He glanced at the ground beneath him. "Sorry, nature. Gotta cause a little destruction for a while." His eyes lifted, locking onto the entity standing over Reimu's broken form.
"Buddy. That's as far as you can go," He muttered as his Mana surged at his feet, not a glow, but a visible distortion of space. Then, he moved. The ground where he stood shattered into a crater as the mana detonated and he launched forward, a human-shaped projectile of pure force.
The triangular entity began to monotone, "PRAIS TAG. KLAY-M. in-ISH-ee-ay-ting reh-TRE—(Price tag. Claim. Initiating retre—)"
The word was obliterated by Nowa's fist connecting with its face.
The impact was a localized earthquake. The air shattered in a visible quake. A sickening, bone-crackling crunch echoed over the lake. The entity was violently thrown backward, skipping across the water's surface like a stone, its passage pushing a wall of air that cleared the mist for a hundred meters.
Marisa and Ran were thrown back to the ground, covering their faces from the concussive aftershock. Sakuya, struggling in the water, was swamped by the sudden, massive wave.
Nowa stood, fist still extended, steam rising from his knuckles. He can understand its language thanks to his auto translation gift. His voice was icy. "Claim. Claim ka diha, piste kaw na yawa.(Claim. Go claim it there, you fucking devil.)"
He lowered his fist, the steam dissipating. He then turned, his expression unreadable, and offered a hand down to the stunned Reimu.
Reimu stared at the offered hand, then up at his face. The casual, world-shattering power was one thing. The icy, personal foreign fury in his voice was another. She took his hand, and he pulled her to her feet with effortless strength. Her body ached, but her mind was reeling.
Across the lake, the entity staggered to its feet on the water. One of its bulging eyes was bleeding. Its triangular head was visibly cracked. For the first time, its uncanny smile was gone, replaced by a glitching snarl of pure, hatred rage.
Nowa didn't even look concerned. He made a calm, sweeping gesture to his side without turning. "You lots. Stay back." His tone brooked no argument. He then walked calmly towards the lake's edge where Sakuya struggled in the water.
"W-wow. Didn't know you were holding back that much, Old-timer," Marisa said, her voice a mix of awe and a newfound, healthy fear. She limped to Reimu's side as she held her gifted rune roomba that saved her to an initial kick.
"That... that was only pure physical strength and mobility," Ran mumbled, her mind struggling to compute the display as she moved behind the line Nowa had drawn.
Nowa reached the water's edge. A flow of black liquid, his Nano Armament and coated his boots. He stepped onto the lake's surface and walked across it as if on solid ground, the water perfectly still beneath his feet. He reached Sakuya, bent down, and scooped her up in a princess carry. He turned and walked back, depositing her gently on the shore beside the others.
He then shrugged off his dark blue jacket, leaving him in a simple white t-shirt, and draped the jacket over Sakuya's drenched and shivering shoulders.
"Whoa... smooth, Old-timer," Marisa muttered with a pained grin while clutching her injured side. Sakuya gave him a slight, pained nod of thanks, her usual composure strained but present.
Finally, he turned his full attention back to the lake. His gaze locked onto the regenerating entity.
'That thing is an atom phaser. It can phase through detectable attacks,' he thought. Then all pretense, all weariness, was gone.
"Alright," he said, cracking his knuckles. "Glad you survived that, geometric-shitter. It means you're one of the few who can take a good-beating. Good. Because I'm going to return everything you did to them, and I'm going to make you eat your own fucking smile."
"Go beat 'em, Old-timer!" Marisa cheered from the sidelines, her voice full of fierceness.
Reimu let out a pained sigh of resignation, clutching her injured shoulder. "Just... just don't go overboard, Nowa."
He smirked as he glanced back at the wounded girls. "Be not afraid." Then his focus returned to the entity.
'I'm stuck, should I go full power? No… this realm wouldn't be able to survive from the wreckage… then how about this one instead.' He tapped his chest three times with a fist. With each tap, a soft, clear ring, like a distant temple bell, reverberated through the air.
"Rune Armament, Version 2. Activate."
He raised his arm in front, and the Liquid Nano Armament surged. It coated his arm. The substance deepened to the black of the true void, hardened like a second skin that looked less like metal and more like solidified nothingness, the hardest substance in the universe.
He clenched his hardened-black fist, the air cracking around it. "You're not worth my special abilities. So I'm going to beat your ass to a pulp."
The entity screeched in raw, algorithmic frustration. Nowa didn't even flinch, he simply swiped a hand through the air. The distorted sound wave violently bounced off his hardened-black fist and was redirected harmlessly into the forest, shredding trees into splinters.
"Out of all the attacks..." he let out a weary sigh. "Whatever…" he raised his voice slightly to accommodate the girls behind him. "You lots, listen carefully. I will dissect what you are fighting here in simple non-quantum terms and teach you how this can be dealt with."
"Teach us—?" Marisa started, but his voice had already dropped. "Here comes the end."
He disappeared. The ground where he stood cratered a second time due to the mana detonation. The entity had no time to process before Nowa's fist met its face again. The impact violently launched it backward, but a tendrils of black nano-matter shot out from his fist, snagging the confused entity like a fish on a hook and yanking it back towards him.
PUNCH. It was sent flying back.
"Confused are we now? I figured the type of your structure." he yanked it again.
PUNCH. Another impact, another violent retrieval, like a ping-pong ball on a rope.
As it flew farther this time, Nowa swung it in a wide, brutal arc. "Your structure is simple, in the eyes of people like me of course. You exploit reality in your favor and its glitchiness, clever, but it can be countered with the right timing whenever your hide glitches, or in my case. A fist in your face."
Disoriented, the being managed to shoot a few bone-spike bullets.
"Tsk." Annoyed, Nowa reeled himself toward it, and it toward him, dodging projectiles mid-motion, his body already shifting into a flying kick.
CRUNCH. The kick connected with its chest. In the same heartbeat, Nowa spun and drove his foot into its side, sending it skidding across the water's surface.
He wrapped all of its limb completely with LNA before he reeled himself after it, drop-kicking it on impact, sliding across the lake as the being briefly became his skateboard. "Bonakkids. You may be can't be detected by normal means, and you've clearly done your homework, beating them in a way they can't fight back! But…" He launched it into an ollie trick that ended with a kick to the air, hurling it skyward.
Nowa pulled himself up on the tendrils, meeting the entity at its apex. "Cheating won't get you as far as you all would think."
PUNCH. Downward, the air cracking like thunder. "See? What else to phase through the physical contact when you are facing a void-substance that has nothing to begin with? Try to learn meta-physics, you son of a bitch."
The tendrils reeled it in again. "And finally, meeting me is the worst thing you could ever do. You're aware of this for some reason…"
PUNCH. To the left. Thrown back. Reel back.
His tone was cold and low enough for the entity to hear. "Let me teach you a proper cheat, You end the fight instantly. Not toy with your victims."
PUNCH. To the right. Thrown back. Reel back.
The air itself became a violent maelstrom, shaking and roaring with each impact. Behind them, Reimu threw up a shaky barrier, the three wounded women huddling behind it as the concussive winds threatened to tear them from the ground, Sakuya's borrowed coat swayed with the violent wind.
"W-wow…" Marisa muttered in awe.
Ran's brow furrowed, her wounded mind still trying to process. "To punch a glitch with nothing… It's getting more confusing the more he explains it."
"He said it's meta-physics," Reimu answered, her eyes never leaving the fight, her barrier holding steady. "He knows more about how reality works than we do." Sakuya said nothing. She simply pulled Nowa's coat tighter around her shoulders, her eyes fixed on the fight.
Nowa's whole body spun in the air, a whirlwind of concentrated force. "This is for punching the one person who looked like my mother…" he murmured as he used the momentum to violently pull the entity into the path of a devastating axe kick, driving his heel down onto its core. The entity shot toward the lake like a meteor, impacting the water with such force that the lake was blasted apart, revealing the muddy bed below in a crater of steam and temporarily displaced the water.
Before the water could even begin to fall back, Nowa's gaze snapped to the splintered remains of the tree Marisa had been thrown into.
"Now a payback to what you did to the kid!" His Liquid Nano Armament shot out, latching onto the massive trunk and yanking it from the earth. As it flew toward him, the hardened-black substance flowed over it entirely, imbuing the wood and transforming it into a colossal tree-spear of absolute hardness.
He caught the now-hardened-black tree, spun once more to gather impossible momentum, and hurled it downward.
The hardened-tree-spear lanced through the air, not with a whistle, but with a sound like reality tearing, and struck the stunned entity at the bottom of the empty lake crater.
The muddy lakebed cratered further under the impossible weight of the attack. Nowa then yanked the tree-spear free and tossed it dismissively back towards the forest, its form returning to its original tree color.
"Finally, for the miko Ribbon and She Fox!" He shot downward, one foot stomping onto the entity's core, causing another crater on the poor, muddy lake-bed, before his hardened-black gauntlet seized it by the throat.
As the lake water rushed back to fill the lake-bed crater, Nowa leaped upward, landing perfectly on the violently receding water to now-calm water surface, holding the glitching, helpless entity aloft, all limbs still wrapped. Its form flickered, its power completely suppressed.
He turned his focus to the huddled girls. "Your turn, lots," he said, his voice calm. "Hit it with all your might. Don't worry about missing it again, the glitching effects are just glorified advanced ghost tissue. And don't worry about me." He presented the broken entity's body towards them like a practice dummy.
For a moment, there was only stunned silence. They stared at the cosmic horror he held like a ragdoll.
Ran broke the silence. "I see… so that thing is just another ghost with more complexity built into it." She nodded slightly in pain as she finally realized what he meant.
Then, a grin, a real, fierce, and painful one, spread across Marisa's face. "Heh... heheh... You're the best, Old-timer!" Her Mini-Hakkero flared to life, glowing brighter than it had all day. It began overwhelmingly charging up as she aimed her mini-Hakkero at the target.
Sakuya, leaning on Ran for support, was the first to move. She raised her hand. A dozen knives materialized in the air pointing at the entity.
"Storm blade: Killing doll!" With a flick of her wrist, they shot forward simultaneously, peppering the entity with a burst of precise, piercing strikes that embedded itself in its glitching form.
Reimu stepped forward next, her Gohei held high. Her eyes held a cold fire. "This is for my shrine. For my home. FANTASY SEAL!" A massive, slow spinning yin-yang orb descended from the heavens, slamming into the entity with the weight of divine judgment that violently splashed the water back. Nowa didn't flinch. He simply activated his third rune layer. A hexagonal, honeycombed barrier of shimmering nano-matter flickered into existence around him, Except the entity just as the Yin-Yang Orb landed on the entity.
A purifying explosion of light erupted, making the entity's body fray and snap under the spiritual pressure.
As the light faded, Marisa's grin was a slash of white in the settling dust. Her Mini-Hakkero, despite its cracks, whined as it completed its charge, glowing with incandescent, multicolored fury. "Alright, my turn you glitchy bastard! Eat this! MAGICANNON: FINAL MASTER SPARK!"
A beam of pure, apocalyptic energy, wider than a largest, ancient, tree trunk and fueled by all their collective pain, fury, and relief, lanced across the lake.
The world turned white and sound disappeared into a roar of pure power, but within the barrier, there was only a calm, intense light and the sensation of a universe-ending force being barely contained and dissipated.
One by one, they had unleashed their fury. Nowa stood unwavering at the center, the unshakable pillar allowing them to safely weather their own storm. It was no longer a battle for survival; it was a ritual of reclaiming their strength, and he was their anchor.