Episode 49: Science Was Not Prepared For This.

Well when push had come to shove, I found myself stuck on this rack waiting for something. I didn’t really know what, but since Zoey was indisposed and I was mildly (read: absolutely) terrified of the writhing mass of fury frothing around inside me, I was left with the irritating option of just waiting for something. For the first time that I could remember, it was odd that I actually had no way of affecting my situation with my own actions.

With a sigh, I closed my eyes and settled down to try and think. My life hadn’t been taken out of my hands before, so it probably wasn’t about to start now. Not with some secluded science-hermit. there had to be something I was missing, some option I was overlooking which wasn’t relying on the bond between Zoey and I.  In situations like these I had usually just brute-forced my way through using Zoey or Ariel like a hammer through the issue.

Well, since Ophelia had interfered it was really just Zoey.

… And that was what I was missing. I had almost expressly been ignoring everyone aside from Zoey since that incident. Miku was emotional support, but Zoey had been my weapon – My hammer. I was so narrowly focused on gaining power to kill Ophelia that all I had really seen Zoey as was a tool to achieve that. She was a means to an end.

Not only had I ignored her personally, but that focus left me tunnel-visioned in regards to Miku, Fen, Ariel, Trinity and Cecilia. At some point my mindset had shifted into the thing I learned to hate at the start of all this – I had cared for them, but I was their leader. They were tools. Warriors. I had started to lose touch with who I was before Ophelia, what had let me – Let us – get as far as we did in the first place.

I sighed, a half-assed smile quirking up one side of my lips. Maybe getting caught was a good thing – I wasn’t trapped, I was being given a time out and forced to address things. For once, I could take this with a grain of salt and not scream and cry about it. It seemed like I had changed a lot more than I realize during all of this, and in the end it really came back to the fact that I wasn’t entirely sure I approved or disapproved of who I was now.

That was fine though. I was beginning to get a better understanding of mysel-Wait, how was this going to help me get out of this damn room?

“… I’ve become a sentimental idiot.” my head tilted off to the side limply as I sighed, “Well, first thing’s first, I guess.” I could pull at the shackles, but I’d just get shocked for my troubles. That means I really only had a couple options here -And one of them was simply too stupid to work.

Which is exactly why it had to be my best choice. My chest swelled while I inhaled, depressing slowly and deliberately with my breathing as I tried to gauge the most I could handle at a time. This was really just up to luck now.

“MIKU”

I put everything I had into that one scream, because really we probably only had one chance at this… And as I heard alarms begin to go off, I couldn’t keep the satisfied smile off my face.

Cecilia was both too weak to break out, and susceptible to the shocks.

In short order the lights were flickering, and Emily seems to have run clean past my door if the rapid footsteps were any indication.  I wish I could have seen the panic on her face, or what was about to happen.

Trinity could break out, but the restraining cuffs would have her shocked into unconciousness before she made it past the door.

The sound of metal rapidly scraping against metal filled the room, followed by a tremendous crash that seemed to imply a very secure door had just been blown clean off it’s hinges – Emily’s screaming was comedic. Her rapid footsteps ran past my door the other way now, accompanied by a smattering of panicked cries.

Fen could have shrugged off the shocks, but physically she was too weak to break out.

The commotion didn’t stop though, I could hear the wrecking getting closer. Every room from where it started to where I was being destroyed by a force of nature that defied all common sense. The flickering lights were speeding up to the point of becoming some kind of madman’s strobe, and I was forced to close my eyes and listen.

Even if Ariel broke out, these labs were probably too narrow for her to fight in.

The wall to my left very nearly exploded inward, it’s hulking metal frame having been warped without a second’s warning. I jerked away from it instinctively, but only managed to trigger the shock feature of my cuffs as I pulled away – A shock was barely even worth categorizing as a static discharge. For a moment I had to pause and figure out just what had happened. In that moment, the room went dark as the lights finally shut off entirely.

Putting two and two together, I jerked at my shackles again and was rewarded with only the taut chain – confirming my theory the power had just been cut. If anything, this was my chance to get out.

The black in my veins was furious still, but that didn’t matter – I only needed power in the most literal sense. I brushed aside it’s fury without a second thought and tangentially got the feeling it was left dumbfounded while I seized what I needed and felt the veins in my body pulse and expand.

Raw physical power was all I needed to rip myself off that rack and roll onto the floor with the remains of shackles clinging to my wrists and ankles. In the second it took me to make my move, the door to my own was blown open and rocketed across the room and into the wall at the other side – A blinding flash that lit up the darkened room and hallway like the midday sun leaving me blinded and blinking away tears rapidly.

“Good job, Miku!” I smirked, rubbing the tears from my eyes in order to see so I could get up and get going. ” Let’s go find the others, we need to get out of here.” I stumbled up to my feet and began to grope through the dark towards the door, bumping abruptly into a thin body robed in what I could only guess was some kind of soft silks. The collision was shocking – almost literally, as I felt my hair begin to stand on end just from proximity.

A smooth hand gripped my arm tentatively, and a pale yellow glow faded into view as my vision began to return – Long blonde hair framing the pale features of a girl who seemed to be in her early teens with bright crimson eyes that stared up at me inquisitively both inquisitively and nervously as if unsure how to proceed.

We froze, against my better judgement as we most likely did not have time to waste before Emily pulled something out of her sleeve and made our lives miserable, and it took a subdued and almost whispered apology to snap me out of that stalemate.

“Sorry…”

I blinked, straightening up as my bearings returned and I finally accepted who was standing in front of me. She was much taller, far from just the child she should have been.

“Fen hasn’t found Miku yet…”

But undeniably, it was her. It boggled my mind to wonder how this could have even been possible – Did her species all do this? The pale yellow glow that emanated from her long hair served as a faint nightlight in the darkness and simultaneously distracted me again and reminded me that we needed to keep moving.

“No…” I started, shaking my head to regain focus, “No, you did great Fen. I’m proud of you – Let’s go get the others.” I gripped her hand back and threw on a reassuring smirk that seemed to encourage her if the brightening of her eyes and rapid nodding was any indication.

We took off down the halls and I was given a first-hand vision had just what had been causing the chaos earlier, and just why it had rightfully sent our erstwhile captor scrambling away. The moment we arrived at the next door Fen had daintily extended a far too gentle hand for the sheer violence that was about to be inflicted on the hapless slab of metal.
There was exactly one moment where in I had time to blink as the dim glow intensified and coursed chaotically down her arm in a faster-than-sound motion of writhing light which coalesced and jumped between the spread fingertips of her outstretched hand, forming an ethereal Jacob’s Ladder that wrapped upon itself and ejected a blinding surge of force which ripped the door, and a large portion of the wall around it, clean from it’s position and carried it from the hallway into the other side of the room swifter than I could track.

The sheer concussive force blew Fen’s silken clothes and hair back, and nearly toppled where I stood, yet she hadn’t seemed to even notice the feedback of force – Only a split second later, a deafening crack reverberated down the metallic halls as sound caught up with light and the thunder to follow the lightning arrived.

Fen barely paid it any mind as stuck her head into the newly opened room.

“What the FUCK was that!?” Ariel’s unsteady and nearly frantic voice cried from the room, prompting me to stick my head in while I tried to blink my vision back into existence again. “Ariel, the power’s out – Rip those shackles off, we’re leaving!” I ducked out of the room as a variety of interesting curses started filling the darkened room and the sound of snapping metal echoed out of the relatively silent lab.

“Someone tell me how the squirt’s doing that!” The vampire’s amber eyes shone furiously through the dark, illuminated in Fen’s halo. “Am I the only normal one here? Is everyone else going to be a freak of nature that defies reality?” I wasn’t sure if she was overwhelmed or developing an inferiority complex.

Maybe both.

“Look, we can figure it out after we get out of here”, I responded sharply, cutting her rant off before she could gain any momentum, “I don’t want to get strapped down again, so let’s go!” Undoubtedly she wanted to retort, but she swallowed whatever came to mind and nodded as Ariel visibly shifted gears. With that, the three of us ran on in the darkness.

==============

Some time later, with what I assumed to be every door in this section of her impressively extensive underground laboratory completely blown in, the three of us rushed through final door that had only moments before been removed from our path.

The room we came into was lit, if only dimly, and held monitors displaying Cecilia, Miku and Trinity being held hostage as Emily stood within an enclosed balcony above us. The blue haired kappa girl reached forward and flicked something, allowing her voice to be transmitted through speakers hidden somewhere in the room.

“… I’d like to ask everyone to please stop destroying my home.”

And I faltered as the expected evil villain speech was not forthcoming, but a kind of pitiful sounding request.

“I would really prefer not to have to resort to violence to protect my house, so if we could all perhaps calm down and discuss this, I would be very happy.” Despite being taken prisoner and more or less told I was going to be experimented on, I found myself unable to really muster the loathing and dislike I was accustomed to having when I actually fought someone.

So… Maybe talking would work?

“Give Miku back!” 

And the moment I opened my mouth to agree to talk, Fen abruptly launched a thunderbolt across the room with fury sparkling in her eyes, the blast smashing into glass and surprisingly dispersing without a hitch. The room was silent, Fen having yet to retract the hand which had thrown the the bolt, and Emily smiled.

“I deduced you were primarily an electricity user earlier, and thus configured my shielding to account for that.” she informed cherpily, “I must say, draining my own facilities power to fuel such a transformation… I had not believed such a thing was possible – Perhaps I misjudged!” She was far too happy for someone who had just been sent running and had her house trashed, “Ah, the kurumi – Ariel was it? What is your special abnormality?”

“I don’t have one!” Ariel snapped back irritably, “I’m normal!”

I sighed. This wasn’t going anywhere. “Alright, we’ll talk.” I answered her previous question, moving past Fen to address the scientist above us. “You don’t want your home trashed, and I want don’t want to stay in your home. So how about you let us all go and we forget you’re here?” Ideally we could all just get on with our lives.

“Nein, I cannot in good conscience let such a valuable collection of specimens walk away. Perhaps we could come to another compromise?” I blinked slowly. She wanted us to stop trashing her home, but remain guinea pigs? “That is… unnacceptable, ja?”

I nodded, and she sighed. “I had expected as much. And there’s nothing I can offer besides freedom that will cease ze hostilities?” I shook my head, to which she seemed to sag. “Ah..”

We all sat in silence, staring at one another for several minutes before a cheery ‘ding’ sounded from her balcony and Emily’s eyes lit up. I quirked an eyebrow at the sudden change in demeanor. “What was that?”

“Configurations for my personal home-defense systems have completed their update to have reduced drain opportunity and increased electro-magnetic resistance properties.” She informed me with a smile, and being fairly bad when it came to book-smarts, it took me a second to peace together what she said. It took Ariel one second less than it took me – That is to say she responded immediately.

“You bitch! You never planned to talk this over at all!” My fury followed shortly afterwards, but I couldn’t say anything that wasn’t redundant now. Oh well, Ariel had been needing something to rant at for a while now. “This was all just a set up to stall us while your stupid upgrades finished! You cheating bitch!” the same insult twice? Either Ariel was off her game or she was too furious to think straight.

“All is fair in love and war and science.” Emily solemnly intoned, Fen stumbled next to me as the lights brightened and golems began to flood the room with restraining devices in hand. It looked this was going to be down to Ariel and I after all.

With a frown I stepped back, grabbing Fen’s shoulder to help support her as Ariel floated in closer to us and tensed in preparation for the fight to come.

“Well… In that case, I guess this was unavoidable.” I muttered, shifting Fen over to Ariel behind me while the defense-golems finished filing in and the lights were once again properly shining. “So… We’re definitely not allowed to just talk this out and maybe get out freedom the non-violent way?” I hazarded again – At this point, I was just ticked. She had trapped us, tricked us, and had the nerve to be happy about it. “Nein, I have neutralized the unknown variable which provided your escape the first time – It will no longer be a hazard to keep you all here.”

I nodded, more to confirm that we really didn’t have a chance to talk this through. “Ariel,” muttering under my breath, I caught her attention, “Hold Fen for me, will you? I don’t really understand it, but I think she was relying on external power sources to stay like this.”

Handing her over to my blonde companion, I breathed in deeply through my mouth and exhaled heavily. “As you said then,” I closed my eyes while addressing Emily, “All is fair in love and war… and science.” the bit tacked on to the end felt corny. It was the bad kind of corny. The kind that made me upset it had the nerve to exist.

“You plan to resist, then?” She asked sadly, but by this point it really was pointless. Both to ask, and to appeal to something.

I smiled back at her, vicious fangs replacing my teeth as blood seeped out of my gums due to the rapid dental metamorphosis, my veins pulsing as the quickening began.

The darkness was angry. It was furious at my presence. That suited me fine – For once I wasn’t mentally unstable when interacting with unknowable eldritch aspects of myself. I was thinking clearly when I disregarded it’s anger for a second time today promptly grabbed it by it’s metaphorical hair.

The long haired black silhouette sneered at me, crimson eyes sparking in defiance as it opened it’s mouth to scream- but those lips were sealed, and defiance bled into confusion and want as I melded myself into her.

The lights shattered and drove the facility once more into a darkness that seemed to swarm into existence, my eyes shining a bloody crimson through the black while the fanged grin grew ever larger.

“She plans to resist.” I corrected from the dark., moments before electricity flooded from the exposed wiring and converged on Fen – snapping her back into an arguably even more lively form than before. If before Fen had been worried, now… Now she was angry.

“Fen…” the usually childish girl growled as the lightning arched into her back like multi-tiered wings, arching back and forth as she fed ever further on the unrestrained power of the facility, shutting down the monitors as well as any type of control panel Emily had in front of her. “Fen…. Will…” The wings stretched out, unfurling as they grew, arcs rushing across her body like armor and intertwining with her arms to form tesla coil-esque claws which extended from her tensed fingers, the discharge flailing in the air like vipers.

“Fen will hurt you!”

Her promise reverberated the room with the force of heavy thunder, her leg moved forward, a bright flash of light expanding rapidly from surface she stepped upon… And she was gone – A burning white streak of fury whose wings enveloped the room and sought to devour the now ashen faced Scientist.

Episode 48: Some people are captivated by science. Others are captured.

Waking up strapped to a table isn’t really the best way to start your day. I mean, I’ve woken up in worse ways, but being relatively better doesn’t make it good. “You are awake now, ja?” Though being greeted cordially by the person who presumably tied you up is a start, I suppose. “If you do not mind answering a few questions, I would be very appreciative!” I craned my neck forward to look at the blue haired girl from earlier, a clip board in her hand as she almost eagerly awaited my answer.

“. . .” I let my head slump back with a sigh and pulled at my restraints cautiously in an attempt to find out just how secure these things really were. Some kind of leather cuffs attached to chains if the rattling was any indication… Well, at least they weren’t fuzzy and pink. “And if I don’t feel like answering your questions?” the thought was thrown out there speculatively, “Experiments will need to be done to gather information, naturally!”

“…Ah.” I muttered after a moment’s thought, “Of course.” And the room descended back into an amiable silence as my ‘host’ patiently let me mull over my decision. “Experiments traditionally don’t sound appealing… And I’ve got some questions of my own, so why don’t we trade answers?”  I heard short scribbles before she agreed to my terms. I was feeling better about this whole thing, considering my captor apparently wasn’t a sadistic power tripping maniac.

“I will start, ja?” was that a speech tic of hers? “Can you tell me what you are?”

“What am I?” The question caught me off guard, “A… girl?” I ventured curiously, “a danmaku practitioner?” I tried again, trying to think of some appropriate answer for this question. “Can you explain the question?”

“Of course, my apologies for the vagueness! What species do you belong to?”
“Ah. I’m a human.”
“According to my tests, you do not match the standards held by the human species.”
“…What.”
“Ja, your estimated strength, speed, stamina, endurance… They all far outstrip normal human capabilities. Also, your blood is… well, difficult.”

Difficult? The hell is my blood difficult? “If I’m not human, then what am I?” I shot back rhetorically, “Touhou?” It would be my luck, wouldn’t it? I blame Ophelia.

“Nein, you are none of the identified races of touhou.” The sound of something being scribbled filled the gap between her words, “Should I take this to mean you cannot answer the question, then?”

“… Yes.” It was one thing to have extended angsty philosophical debates about your status of existence, it was another thing entirely to have what I could only assume was a scientist tell you concretely that you are some unidentified thing. “Very well, moving on then.”

And so it went on like that for what felt like hours. ‘What is your natural habitat?’, ‘What is your preferred diet?’, ‘How do you reproduce?’, ‘Are you capable of parasitism? Symbiosis?’, ‘what colors do you view most prominently?’…

In return for the seemingly never ending stream of questions and note scribbling, I managed to learn that the rest of my touhou were being held and restrained in much the same way I was, and had undergone their own testing and questioning. We had apparently crash landed through a lake and waterfall and asolid metal wall, straight into this blue haired scientist’s – Emily’s – ‘front yard’ of sorts. Or rather, the entrance to her labs-slash-home.

Put in that perspective, it made a little more sense that she didn’t waste any time restraining us. It’s not often something accidentally manages to infiltrate it’s way at high velocity to the bottom of a lake, behind a waterfall, and through a steel wall. It was completely understandable to believe we were a hostile team of invaders – Though I could only guess as to why a hostile team of invaders would have any business with this scientific-touhou.

Asking about that led to an uncomfortable silence and hurriedly changed subject. Best not to dwell on it.

More importantly though,  I learned that she had done several interesting things. Like using the same leather-chain cuffs to restrain my touhou. Miku and Trinity specifically. I had resisted the urge to laugh when I found out she was expecting these piddly little things to hold either of them – Until I found out they had electrical shocks built into them.

The scientist obviously knew her game.

“So… What exactly do you plan to do with us now?” I ventured curiously, “We obviously aren’t hostile, so you don’t really have a reason to keep us here.” With any luck I could convince her to let us go. I didn’t really have an idea as to where we would be going, but I didn’t have any particular interest in staying here, either.

To my dismay, she shook her head in disagreement. “All of you, except perhaps the Lunachild and Kurumi, have proven to either be abnormal or unidentified species.” She looked at me apologetically, “I’m afraid that as a scientist, I could not live with myself if I let such a rare group of specimens just walk out my hands after they invited themselves in. It is for science that I must regrettably keep you confined here for testing and studying.”

Well that was the worst possible answer. “So… you’ll let Ariel and Fen go, then? Since they aren’t abnormal?” I could maybe still salvage this. “Nein, I have reason to believe they would get help and return in search of either yourself or the others. They are a security hazard.”

Dammit.

“So we’re stuck in here at your mercy, for whatever experiments you plan on running on us? Like dissection and drugs?” She stopped scribbling and snapped her head towards me, “D-Dissection? Why would I kill you when I can simply X-ray you? If the time comes that one of you expire, then I can preform an autopsy… But until then, I would never!” She seemed pretty aghast at the idea, but the fact she planned to keep us restrained until we ‘expired’ didn’t sit well with me at all.

“Now, if there are no further concerns, I need to attend to the others as well.” She waited briefly, but got only a distracted grunt as a response before leaving. I had other things on my mind – Like how the hell we were going to be getting out of this.

“Zoey,” After being sure Emily had left, I spoke up. “can you get me out of these things?” She probably hadn’t counted on me having an eldritch horror living in my shadow. Understandable, I don’t think anyone else actually had one, but it was fortunate for me. “… Zoey?” Except she wasn’t responding, “Now’s not a good time to be sleeping, I need your help here.”

… Or maybe Emily had counted on an eldritch horror in my shadow and somehow restrained her as well?

God. Dammit.

“Alright…” I was speaking aloud now, more to calm myself than speak to Zoey, “I’ll do it myself.” Zoey was an eldritch horror, yes. But it’s not like she was the only monster in our group. I had spent the better part of the last half of my journey angsting over being a freak of some sort… Since push apparently came to shove while I was passed out, it was high time I either admitted I was yet another whiny kid who thought no one understood me, or proved my fears about having some kind of monstrous presence growing inside me were valid.

Find the darkness under my skin… Coursing through my veins. Before I would have rejected it, and tried to beat it back – Now I was different. Now I needed it. I wanted it. I-

Ohgodit’sangrywhatthefuckdidIdotoitI’msorryI’llleaveyoualone.

-I was not touching that furiously churning abyss with a ten foot pole or it would eat me alive.

Well, it could be worse.

At least I was wearing clothes this time.

Episode 47: Touka’s Tragedy, Or, How I Learned To Stop Angsting And Love Holographic Ceilings.

If Ophelia had needed any indication that something unexpected had happened – The horrifyingly eldritch existence that constituted the raw chaos crawling out of the ground and screaming her name in a thousand bloody tongues was probably a good one.

Just what had Ayanavi found on her journey?

“You only need to hold it off.” She stepped back, positioning Norman between herself and Zoey’s enraged form. While her own power was nothing to scoff at – This was an entirely unknown variable. Best not to take chances, and let the humans of this world deal with it. “Help is already on it’s way.” and in the meantime, she could observe to determine just how dangerous this kink in her plans was.

Norman was quite a useful tool. This entire family seemed to be abnormally useful… Perhaps it ran in the blood. “As a gym leader… and as a Father… I will not forgive you, monster!” His touhou were well trained, falling to his leadership even in the face of the thing that had just massacred their gym head on. “Accept your punishment!”

Ophelia, at that time, had a premonition. Norman was incapable of protecting her from this for any conceivable amount of time.

In the time it had taken her to extend the gap between herself and the Gym leader to an perfectly acceptable range of miles away – In the time it took for Norman to blink, the time it took for his touhou to begin moving forward to attack – There was a sharp blackness that warped the light around it and consumed everything in its’ path.

Zoey had moved.

Chen’s body was grabbed in mid-air, the sound of her own ribcage collapsing under the pressure drowned out by the scream of air from being tossed like a ragdoll into one of Norman’s other touhou. The fox eared one had stopped her attack to intercept Chen’s flight, only to be rocketed backwards upon impact – Or rather, would have been, had her ankle not been caught.

A cry caught in her throat, as her thigh was abruptly dislocated from her hip – Bone popping away effortlessly, followed by her muscles and skin being torn from the conflicting force of her own momentum and the immovable clawed grasp that held her. In a moment that felt like eternity, her skin stretched – growing thinner with each second – gaining a pink hue to it that gave way as dark red blood erupted from within it’s now far too thin barrier. Muscles tensed instinctively as the pain registered, but it only served to jerk the hamstring that ran up into her hip further outside of the wound before it snapped taught.

Touhou were stronger than humans. Their bodies were more durable.

Which was why the fox-eared touhou’s muscle did not break. It held tight, abruptly stopping her momentum for a second of agony and terror… That passed as Zoey jerked her leg through the air roughly, and sent the rest of Ran’s body swinging upon her own muscle through the air and crashing into Norman’s final touhou, a pink haired girl. The force of the blow was enough to bring her to her knees, but it was far from the end.

Jerking Ran’s leg up, the mutilated touhou was sent straight away from the ground, only to reach the apex of her flight and be jerked back down like a whip – The momentum of her flight finally snapping the hamstring which had held her body to her leg, causing both her, and the injured catgirl in her arms to crash down ontop of the pink haired touhou hard enough to shatter bone, and the windows of the buildings surrounding them.

Zoey’s clawed hand clenched viciously, her eyes turning to Norman as the leg grasped between her digits was cleanly shredded to pieces upon constriction. There wasn’t time to scream – Not before the monster that had masqueraded as his daughter was upon him, before the same claws that had so mercilessly rent apart his touhou had pierced his torso and held him aloft.

Not before his throat constricted at the sight of crimson eyes beneath the dark veil, clouded and unfocused in a state of rage that left Zoey blind and deaf to all but the song of her own wrath.

Before she could continue her warpath through Norman however, the shaking of the ground tore her attention away from him and towards the latest source of opposition. With a careless toss, she had let Norman crash back into his Gym and turned towards the newcomer dangerously.

The quaking of the earth wasn’t just for show however, as spikes of rock rapidly erupted from the ground in a blazingly fast line straight towards Zoey. Her attempt to dodge them halted one of the lances which had managed to pierce her shin, holding her in place long enough to be struck through by the remaining earthen columns that furiously penetrated her body from all sides.

The darkness grew thinner and thinner under the assault, finally being sealed away within a solid sphere of rock that promptly compressed itself to further crush it’s sole inhabitant.

…And for a moment, the battle was over. For that brief moment, before the a dark tendril pierced the sphere, crossing the space between it and the source of the earthquake in an instant – A familiar bloody claw crunching down around the touhou’s body mercilessly as it retracted at a terrifying speed and slammed her body clean through the rock sphere’s and inside of an inky orb of blackness concealed within.

There was stillness – like the calm before the storm – Before that same touhou was ejected violently, covered in gashes and bathed in her own blood, crashing into a house situated next to the gym. The house promptly collapsed on top of said touhou.

And from the darkness, two claws split the darkness, raking across the rock shell as Zoey emerged from within and shoved the earth away effortlessly – Turning her eyes towards the newest in the seemingly perpetual line of opposition.

Some blonde in a sun hat had opened her mouth- and the sound that came out was ungodly enough to cause Zoey’s control of her own darkness to waver, losing the finely honed edge of her claws as the shadows around her reverted into the consistency of wet cement.

It was unacceptable.

With a roar, she had launched herself across the divide and slammed down a heavy tendril to crush the girl – A tendril intercepted by yet another obstacle, a red haired touhou who took the brunt of her attack as the ground cratered under their feet. With the blonde still singing, Zoey’s ability to effortlessly dispatch the annoyance in front of her was effectively diminished, and so came the grueling exchange of brutal and unforgiving strikes between the two.

All she had to do was crush this red haired touhou and dispose of the blonde, or destroy the blonde – bypassing this one entirely. Neither option was simple, as Zoey’s own blows were more akin to a bludgeon than a blade, and this red haired touhou seemed especially apt to survive and weather the storm of physical impacts.

… So it was some time before she buckled – Never a question of ‘if’, only ‘when’. The final blow was enough to drive her off her feet and into the depths of a nearby pond, as Zoey reared up to destroy the singing abomination.

“Lisa!” Only for it’s owner to dive in front of it.

…And Zoey froze – A tendril capable of crushing the two things beneath it like insects just hovering immobile above them. For a second, crimson eyes cleared and focused – And saw what was in front of her.

“…Aya…navi…?”

The tendril shifted, reforming gradually into the rough shape of a hand – Extending towards the human in front of her slowly, cautiously.

“Master!” A shrill cry broke that illusion, but Zoey’s rage had already been shattered. Her head whipped to the side in surprise as an unbearably bright light erupted from a nearby rooftop and bore down upon her. It was… strong. Radiating raw power in a focused, unrefined form.

And… it was bright.  Bright enough to melt the darkness behind her. To break away her armor as it approached. To blot the darkness that composed her. In a breath’s span before it hit, the eldritch monster’s emotions spiraled – realization, despair, resignation, remembrance, hope, and resolve.

Then the white light erased the world – All that remained when it cleared were the ruins of Touka.

And somewhere above, Ophelia watched the aftermath with a cryptic expression.

——————

I remembered waking up under the rain. I don’t know how long it had been raining, or how I had gotten here…  I don’t remember… how long I had been laying here either. An intense pain wracked my body with each breath, an experience I was previously familiar with due to my prior sojourn into Zoey’s… Zoey.

It clouded my sight as I arranged my mind under the dark clouds that poured down on top of me. What had happened back then… The sudden surge of emotions that weren’t my own. How angry I had become. How miserable I had felt. It was less of a link and more comparable to my body being used as a puppet by the sheer overwhelming intensity of it all.

For a time I had all but forgotten who, what, and where I was. It was… Exhausting. In a way that left me unsure whether my inability to move now was a result of the constricting pain or my own immeasurable fatigue that resulted in a body which had skipped the protesting phase and simply refused to respond to me at all.

And it was the times where I lost myself so completely that I garnered glimpses of a nightmare. Where I could feel my hands gripping down, feel my throat grow hoarse from screams that never made it to the surface – Frustrated, voiceless screams teetering between anger and mourning.

It was that nightmare which made me suspicious of the rain and mud that lay around me – That it’s texture was not truly a thick blood which ran deep into the earth and soaked the earth. Suspicious, that even though I could see it’s clear reflection out of the corner of my eye, I couldn’t unsee the red in front of me.

A nightmare that elicited unwanted memories of Kinsetsu, forcing them to light whether I wanted them buried or not.

My lips parted minutely, a stream of dark red bubbling up from within and panting my lips with it’s coppery smell – Polluting the clean water which had pooled around me in this mud. This blood was my own, I had to repeat that. Firmly instill that thought in my mind. If I didn’t, then this blood belonged to those of Kinsetsu, because as I had learned, blood does not taste that different; No matter who it comes from.

And I could feel my motionless body in a flurry of movement. Grasping down mercilessly on things with no hope of escaping. Ripping and tearing apart everything in front of me in some tedious balance between anger and liberation. That their pain made this blood taste better, that this was both right and my right.

My lungs compressed roughly, driving yet more crimson out of my mouth in a painful wheeze which spurred me into rolling over lest I choke on my own fluids – An  action my body only regretfully conceded to me in return for agony that likes of which brought tears to my eyes and caused my fingers to curl inwards – a veritable waterfall of blood descending from my now gaping mouth as I felt my stomach ache and heave upwards, pieces of flesh I was relatively certain were not my own occasionally accentuating the red stream that had come to occupy the water I lay in.

The thought crossed my mind then, that this pain was simply the darkness under my skin purging me of my humanity. I was expelling my own blood in favor of lining my veins with black.

It was a silly thought, or that’s what I will convince myself. Because I know that at this point, what was running through my veins didn’t decide who I was anymore than what I was. A darkness under my skin made me no more of an abomination than it made Zoey something unspeakable.

Monster was a term reserved for people like Ophelia, who had toyed with and manipulated my life for fun.

Monster was a term reserved for people like Brawly, who would sacrifice some random touhou for his stupid religion.

Monster was a term reserved for people who turned on their own principles, or did something unforgivable. Losing sight of themselves and their own guiding compass as they lost control – Or they let go.

Monster was a term reserved, I thought to myself, not for the state of something, but for what it meant for that thing to exist relative to other things. There were numerous monsters in this world, some more so than others, but it always came down simply to who was a monster to who.

So if I were to look at Zoey, I couldn’t see a monster beyond the lonely girl. Her existence meant she ate humans, her ‘true’ form was something unknowable by natural law… But to me, she was just a lonely girl.

But if I were to address that thing which miserably glowered back up at my from this crimson stained reflection before me – I would see something that fit a term reserved for other people. A girl that had selfishly raged, looked to the heart of the world and shouted “I!” with an imperious air, and denied it all. A human that had taken joy in subjugating her own kind, ripping them apart and devouring them whole only because the rush of power was an exhilarating release.

I could look at that sick creature staring at me beyond the dirty crimson mirror and assuredly say ‘You’re a twisted monster’.  It was a simple truth, just like the sky was usually blue and water was more or less always wet. I took and lived with this information the same way I took and lived with that information – And if others tried to reveal it to me, I feel like I would object principally while inwardly nodding as if to say ‘well yes, of course’.

The part that I had, until this moment, not been able to fully grasp… Was that just as I would with wet waters and blue skies, that statement would be invariably followed by an irritated question of ‘and what of it?’, not because it offended me – But because it was stupid to repeat or state the obvious.

If water was wet, and the skies were blue, then that was simply their nature. If Zoey existed as an eldritch god-eating monstrosity, but her nature was that of lonely girl, then it was obvious which detail I would pay attention to and accept.

And if I existed as just another human, but my nature was that of a monster, then it was as stupid to deny it as it was to make an accusation of it.

In my mind, these thoughts manifested coherently as “urghp”. Trying to vocalize it resulted in another wretch from my dry heaving stomach which left my exhausted body shaking just to keep my face out of the vomit and blood corrupted water.

My time in Zoey had left me in quite possibly the worst state I could ever remember being in… But with it, I feel like I had come to a better understanding of something I couldn’t quite place. That beneath this pain and agony, I no longer felt that subconscious rejection and loathing of myself.

So, despite being in what I assumed to be some sort of mind numbingly horribly agony, I actually felt pretty good about myself right now. I was a monster – and I was okay with this.

“Augh… Ayanavi… What the hell is this…”
“M-Mistress… it hurts…”
“Where… are we…”

Around me, in their own pools in the mud, lay Ariel, Cecilia and Trinity. From the sounds of it, they hurt just as badly as I did. It was good to have friends to share your pain with.

“Miku!”
“F-Fen doesn’t….feel so good…”

Miku was as impervious as ever – Cheerful, even. Even with Ariel’s broken growls to do horrible, horrible, vaguely erotic but exceedingly painful things with her onion stick to the perpetually happy teal haired girl.  I didn’t think the leek thing was long enough or flexible enough to do that, though.

Probably.

“So…” A voice I didn’t recognize finally chimed in, a small, blue haired girl with a large backpack peering down on us from somewhere out of view. “Does anyone want to explain how you all ended up in my front yard?” she seemed genuinely curious.

“Sgood…..shgood question.” I bubbled back from my spot on the ground, “I thought so too.” The blue haired girl affirmed with a thoughtful tone, “It’s not every day someone is rocketed to the bed of ze lake and through an underground waterfall, bypassing all of my security in one fell swoop.” She paused, “Much less an entire group of people.”

I felt like sighing – And I would have, had my face not been firmly planted in bloody vomit mud. I settled for holding my thumb up shakily.  “Can’t be underground….” Ariel coughed, “sky’s right there.”

“Ja, I like my holographic ceiling too. It’s nice for several hour long relaxing sunsets.”

“….but…rain..” Ariel seemed to grasp for some sense of common logic in the face of adversity.

“Nein, that’s just a leak.”

It feels like, lately, I’ve been finding the things around me changing before I have enough time to properly process and deal with the things I already have. I needed some nice, relaxing down time – Maybe a month or so – to just sit and organize my life. Angsting on the run didn’t seem to be working out well, but I felt kind of dirty if I just got on with something without giving it it’s proper dues.

However, in the meantime – This blue haired girl was another thing to change in my life. And I would address it, just as soon as I could get out of this puddle and move my body again.

“So… I guess you guys don’t plan to get off my front yard?” I let my hand plop back down into the mad in answer, “Kay, that’s cool. Do you mind if I go get some equipment and instruments to study you in ze meantime?”

I’d have answered, but I decided I was going to sleep then.

“Wundervoll!” she exclaimed as I drifted off, the sound of her feet splashing away signalling the end of my waking period.

Episode 46: Hell holds no wrath comparable.

As the sun rose, I remembered that the strange human was supposed to be meeting with another human at something called a ‘gate’ around this big human-place. They’d probably worry if she didn’t show up, so I figured it’d be best if I went in her stead! Of course, I remember the strange human telling me that I can’t just walk show up in human-places without a disguise, or they might get upset and toss snowglobes at me…

Which is why I was currently walking through the big human-place disguised as the strange human! Except for my eyes. I like my eyes. They’re pretty and red and the strange human’s eyes weren’t pretty or red, so I kept my eyes. Now I just needed to find the rest of my friends and we can try and figure out what a gate is.

Friends was a strange concept. I wasn’t entirely sure what it was supposed to mean – But the strange human said we were friends, and she talked and ate with me, which was nice. And she didn’t run screaming or try to eat me, which was also nice. If this was what friends did, I thought friends were pretty nice.  Strange human was also friends with other things, and they were strange too – But they were fun, and since they were friends with my strange human then they were friends by extension. Probably.

Which led me back to my first goal – Finding my friends so we could figure out what a gate is. Lets see… Strange human told them to wait at some kind of center. It was probably that building we always looked for when we came to human-places, it was like a safe-hole that we could rest in. So if I found the safe-hole, I’d find my friends.

Except… The human-place was big, and this walking thing was slow. ‘How was Zoey supposed to find something like that in a place like this?’

I lifted myself a few feet off the ground and looked around, dismissing the other humans who had stopped to stare. None of them were my friends, so they didn’t matter. “Zoey probably needs to find a tall place in order to find the safe-hole…”

Nodding to myself, I poof’d from my position above the ground to the top of a nearby building, waving away the dark wisps that attempted to follow me out of the shadow of the big metal thing next to me. “If Zoey is this high up, she can definitely find it!”

…Sure enough, a few moments, later, I found the safe-hole.

Poof’d

—————————-

“Friends!” I greeted the rest of my friends as I walked through the door, causing the silver haired one to nearly jump clean through the roof as she about faced. “M-Mistress! Where have you been?!” She was excited this morning, that was good. “You told us to gather back here, but you never came back! I thought that inferior doppleganger had done something to you!” I smiled, showing off a mouth full of sharp fangs, “Strange human is glad to see you all awake!” I spread my arms out by habit, ignoring the silver haired friend’s excited gibbering, “Come, we must find out what a gate is!”

I turned to leave, expecting them to follow – And they did. Sort of. It took them a few moments of staring, and the silver haired one was muttering confusedly as we exited the safe-hole. “…Strange human?” I stood outside, hands on my hips as I looked around enthusiastically – I didn’t really know what a gate was, but the others probably would. They know things like this. “…Mistress, are you… feeling well?” The silver haired one however, did not seem to realize we were searching for a gate.

“Strange human does not feel like water.” I corrected her solemnly, attempting to explain to her once more what we were doing. “What is a gate? We need to find it.” The silver haired friend seemed like she wasn’t convinced – Maybe I should stop referring to myself as Strange Human –  but after several moments of indecision, she pointed in the direction of some sort of large metal contraption. “Good job…” I paused, contorting my face in confusion as I accessed the strange human’s memories to try and figure out what her name was…

“… Maid!”

I smiled, proud of my accomplishments as we turned as one to walk towards the ‘gate’.

————–

“…I think Ayanavi got ahold of something amazing last night.” Trinity muttered, walking past the horribly confused Cecilia. “But… eyes… teeth…. strange human… Miku?” Cecilia turned to the teal haired girl in askance, “Isn’t this suspicious?” Miku shrugged with a smile, skipping after Trinity carelessly and leaving Cecilia hanging back in turmoil. “No one?” She called futilely, “….Just me…?”

Cecilia felt like it was going to be a stressful day. “She called me a maid…” and the fretting had only just begun. “Did I make her angry…? M-Mistress!”

————–

It wasn’t long before my friends and I arrived at the fabled ‘gate’. Now that we were here, it was just a matter of finding out what we were meeting here for – There was another human here who looked like my strange human. They smelled different though. This human was not my strange human – But my strange human was meeting with this human, so obviously they were here for something.

“Hello…” I paused, searching for this new human’s title, “little sister!” I glanced between Little Sister and my friends as we assembled, “We’re ready now!”

“Hey Ay..ah!” Little Sister jumped back, staring intently in my direction – This wasn’t how other humans greeted each other. “…Navi. Should I be concerned about…” Little Sister motioned at something, “..this?” I turned back to see Cecilia whispering rapidly to Miku and Trinity, neither of which seemed to be nonplussed by the situation. Turning back to Little Sister, I shrugged nonchalantly.

“Of course not Little Sister.” it was a casual answer, “So, what are we doing?”

“I told you already, I’m not a girl. We were just waiting on you before we set out. Ready to go?”

I nodded slowly, “Lead on, Little Sister!” I didn’t know where we were going, so it’s good that my strange human prepared a guide for us. Turning back to the others, I waved them on up to us. “Let’s go!”

Little Sister sighed, and turned to walk away.

———–

Sometime later, Little Sister spoke up again – Dragging me from my distracted observation of the forest around us.  “So.. did you have a plan for dealing with the volcano god? You did already encounter it once, right?” I cocked my head curiously, trying to remember if we had encountered a volcano god before. And what a volcano was.

Shifting through my strange human’s memories only gave me the image of the big chicken I tried to eat earlier. Everyone was going to eat it with me, we all worked together really hard to try and get it – But I accidentally let it escape.

“…Eat it.” I answered after a moment’s thought, “I won’t let it get away this time, so we can all enjoy it.” I smiled, fangs spreading wide across my face, “That’s what friends do, right?”

“…Eat it.” Little Sister parroted blankly, turning back towards her friends slowly as I smiled. A small gray haired one stepped closer to her, but the others spread out a little – I sniffed the air curiously, catching a strange scent on the air as they moved.  “You’ve been acting a little strange lately… did something happen?”

I blinked once, turning my ruby eyes back towards Little Sister.

They were scared, I could smell it. I tried to do my best to reassure them – How do humans reassure each other? Smile? Yes. I smiled reassuringly at Little Sister, trying to make eye contact as I responded. “Should I act differently?” Being a human was hard, they get suspicious over the strangest things, “I can if you’d like, it’s nothing to worry about.” My strange human would be sad if I lost our guide – And I still don’t know where we’re going, so we would probably be lost too.

…Unless I ate the guide and just found out mysel- Wait, no. Humans don’t eat Humans.

————-

“M-Mistress is having an off day.” Cecilia stepped in hesitantly, “There were… complications last night.” Trinity had assured her that her Mistress had not been replaced by some horrible evil, and that she was in fact just very tired. and maybe had a hangover. ‘Trust me, I woke up like that one time, too. It happens.’ she had said, assuring her that – Yes. Bloodshot eyes were a common side effect of alcohol.

‘bloodshot eyes are not solid red…!’ She wanted to object, but everything else about her Mistress had… kind of… Oh who was she kidding, this was not her Mistress. Someone had replaced her Mistress during the night and no one believed her.

She… She… Cecilia couldn’t wrap her mind fully around the concept trying to wedge its way into her head, but… She needed Ariel’s help. That vampire knew her Mistress… Somehow. She’d see the difference. They could find her Mistress, and depose of this imposter.

But before then, she needed to keep the imposter convinced that no one was suspicious. If they had her Mistress somewhere, outing them too early might put her in danger.

“Why don’t we continue moving?”

——————

Maid’s intervention tipped me off to something she hadn’t noticed before – Maid obviously knew that the Strange Human had asked to go inside me last night! I made a note to myself to explain to her later that I was Zoey, and not Strange Human, though it made me proud that I had managed to act like a human so well so far.

This was a good idea. “Yes, complications.” I affirmed her story helpfully.

“Alright then.” Little Sister finally admitted, “If you say so.” The scent of fear diminished, so I guess I did good. “Did you all have anything to do with waking up the god in the first place, by any chance?” But then Little Sister kept asking questions – Silly questions.

“Of course, I tried to eat it.” I tilted my head in confusion, trying to understand what she wasn’t understanding about the ‘I tried to eat it’ concept. “It got away though, even though we tried so hard.” I turned to look back at the others, “We won’t fail twice, though.” I intoned confidently, as if it was an obvious fact – Turning to look back at Little Sister as my smile turned into a fanged grimace of excitement. “Nothing escapes us twice.”

“…So it was you, then.” Little Sister took my confidence the wrong way, why was she getting upset? “So what about Kinsetsu, then? According to the news, they saw you there. Navi,” … Kinsetsu? I began to shift through my Strange Human’s memories for some kind of clue, as I felt, rather than heard, Cecilia’s movements become stiffer. “What has gotten into you?”

“Kinsetsu…” I mumbled aloud, trying to divine what it was, “Kinsetsu… Kinsetsu… Kinsetsu…” My eyes snapped open happily as I found what Kinsetsu was. “The bright place!” now that I knew what Little Sister was asking about, I could get her to stop worrying! “It was too bright.” I answered simply, “I dislike bright things, so I made it darker.” I decided not to tell Little Sister I ate people, humans don’t eat humans – Unless you were my Strange Human, but my strange human was strange.

“so what exactly are you, really?” Little Sister seemed to recoil at my reassurance – This was probably going badly. I was far enough away from a human-place to avoid making them angry right?  “and no lies this time, I want to hear the truth!” Little Sister was yelling at Maid now – I frowned at that.

Stepping protectively between Maid and Little Sister, I attempted to calm the situation.

“I’m the strange human.” I answered clearly, narrowing my eyes defensively at Little Sister to discourage her from continuing her tirade against Maid, “Why don’t we keep moving?”

Little Sister took a step back, cringing at my answer and overall just refusing to agree to my idea of continuing to move. “No – first, I want you to tell me what you did with my sister.” I stared blankly at Little Sister, trying to understand what she meant, “We can continue if you tell me what happened to Ayanavi.”

… Ayanavi? I tried to find a clue in my human’s memories… But all I saw was my human.  Was it my human? Was my human this human’s sister? Maybe that was why they looked similar… No, all humans looked roughly the same anyway.

“…She’s not here.” I answered after several moments of thought, “inside me… Elsewhere. But not here.” I nodded, as if that answered that question – though Maid had suddenly gone quite stiff. “You said we could keep going, now.”

“Did you… eat her?”

I stayed quiet as I tried to figure out exactly what I had done. Or rather, how to explain it. I didn’t eat her, but I kind of did. She was inside me, how difficult was this to understand? Inside was inside.

“…Yes, probably.” I blinked once, a sign of my irritation with the lack of progress and things becoming lost in translation. Being a human was difficult. Talking to humans was difficult. Why couldn’t Little Sister be like my human? My human didn’t have these problems, she was special. That’s why she was mine. She understood me. “Are we going to continue now, Little Sister?”

“Hey.. Is she okay?” The red haired friend of Little Sister piped up, only to get a cheerful “Miku!” as an answer, from somewhere behind me.

“Probably?” Little Sister parroted again, and I could feel my patience getting thinner – Fortunately, she turned to continue walking this time. I nearly let my disguise slip as my body attempted to sigh, following after her sedately – Miku had apparently started carrying Maid at some point, she seemed to have fallen asleep during the conversation. I didn’t blame her. “One more question,” Little Sister was asking more questions again – I really wished she would stop asking questions. “-hy do you look like her?”

“Where are we going?” I countered with a question of my own, irritability causing my inflection to shift towards agitation. If I found out where we were going, I wouldn’t have to deal with this annoying guide.

“I suppose if you were going to do anything bad, you would have already, right?” She wasn’t answering my question. “We’re going to Touka-”

Touka. Touka. Touka.

I dove into my human’s memories again, digging up everything to do with Touka. Dad. Gym. Maze. Destroy.

We were going to Touka to destroy it. Okay.

poof’d

“-If you didn’t even know where we were going, why would you follow me in the first place?”

Misuto’s voice reached an empty forest, as black wisps melted into the shadows. Zoey had left the moment she found out her goal, and taken the rest of her friends with her. There was no point in putting up with this anymore.

——————

Several seconds later, I walked through the front door of Touka’s gym. There was something here called a ‘maze’… All I could gather was that my human hated it and had planned to destroy this town for having such a thing. I didn’t really know what a maze was, but it was apparently one of the most god awfully frustrating things in existence.

Walking up to the first wall, I set my hand against it… and proceeded to rip it in half. I didn’t know what a maze was, so I would just destroy everything to be sure I got it.

“Oh god, what the hell is that?!”
“Is that… Ayanavi?”
“The hell are you doing!”

Humans were starting to rush towards the disturbance, their touhou at the ready- I could smell their hostility. Turning towards them, I bared my teeth to threaten them off… And it was the only excuse they needed to attack.

From that moment on, the gym descended into senseless havoc. Touhou after touhou flung themselves at me, battle cries filling the rapidly deteriorating gym building. I reached out and plucked a speeding fairy from the air as it attempted to zip past me, tossing it head long into two others and knocking them back into their trainers – And through the wall behind them.

This was different from Muro. Different from Kinsetsu. There were no bright lights to hurt me.

And so, this was not a slaughter – It was a beat down. Touhou were stopped effortlessly and tossed aside like ragdolls. Trainers crumpled beneath ruthlessly strong blows. Walls and ceilings fell to pieces around me, and the scent of fear and anger grew thick within Touka.

Fear, anger, and betrayal – As ‘dad’ burst through the wall to meet me, his veins throbbing in anger. I recognized him from my human’s memories, but her intentions were confusing. Defeat him? hurt him? I didn’t understand what she wanted… But he was a gym leader, which meant he would have one of those metal things my human seemed to enjoy collecting.

“Ayanavi!” He was barking at me now, “Explain yourself!” I held the lifeless body of a touhou – What touhou it was is a mystery to me – in my arm carelessly, turning ruby red eyes upon ‘dad’ and staring as I tried to decide the best course of action. “What do you think you’re doing!?” I dropped the touhou, turning to face him entirely. “You’ve gone too far, Ayanavi!”His own Touhou were much stronger than the cattle fodder I had destroyed so casually, “Accept your punishment… As Gym leader of Touka, I cannot forgive you!”

I stared, a cat-eared touhou striking the ground furiously as she rushed across the space between us. The attack was brutal in comparison to what I had just dealt with – I found myself being thrown back through the Gym and into the sunlight outside.

But my respite was short, as the cat eared touhou dashed out after me – Followed by a fox of some sort. It was all I could do to keep track of them as the fox drove it’s heel into me, cratering the ground around me from the impact and reinforcing the quaking earth that fell upon me.

… I hadn’t shed my disguise, had I?
I was still my human, wasn’t I?
…Yes, I could feel it. My disguise was still there.
But humans… they couldn’t survive attacks like that, could they?

Buried beneath the earth, the hard things inside me broken, I heard muffled orders. The land was compacting. It was becoming order to force the squishy things inside me to breathe.

. . .This hostile intent. Was it killing intent? Was this ‘dad’ so vicious to try to kill me? Even if he thought I was a human?

“You see, Norman?” A voice I was familiar with rang through the dirt, “Something happened on Muro… Misuto escaped, but it is as I had feared – Your daughter was taken by what awoke there.” Pity laced that familiar voice, consoling ‘dad’s loss. “What remained was just an empty shell. A mindless, archaic beast from the past.”

… And I felt something sparking inside me. The more that voice spoke, the more I felt like I recognized it. The more I felt like I should know it. “I see that now…” ‘dad’ growled back, “My daughter… Couldn’t have been that monster.”

I smelled misery, “She… died saving her brother on their journey.”
I smelled regret, “Misuto… Ayanavi… I’m so.. sorry.”
I smelled confidence, “You raised fine children, Norman.”
I smelled deceit, “Their bond was such that one willingly sacrificed their life for the other.”
I smelled… “Thank you… But your words don’t dull the pain… Ophelia.”

In that moment, I, Zoey, felt as if the whole of the sun bore down a top of me. That everything I had found in these past months: My friends, my experiences, my human, had been torn from me.

“Zoey… Really likes travelling with you and the others.”

And my own voice rang in my ears. Things I’ve never said.

“Zoey wants to keep travelling with you, for a long time.”

Things I remember saying. On that mountain.

“Please, don’t be afraid of Zoey…”

Things I didn’t understand. Things that didn’t make sense. Echoes and familiar feelings that drifted in and out.

“I accepted you then…”
“I don’t care what you are…”

My human. Something we shared. Something she said. Something important. Something that we had. Something that wasn’t there anymore. Something I had lost. Something that was taken from me. Something that was stolen from. Something that she stole from me.

“What… What’s going on?”
“Oh dear, prepare yourself Norman – The beast awakes.”

Beyond Muro. Beyond Kinsetsu. Beyond light. I felt a pain I can’t explain. It permeated by body. It ate at me. It screamed in ways I could never imagine. Indignation. Horror. Loss. Outrage. Misery. Hate. Overwhelming, single minded hate. A burning emotion so intense that its echoes rattled me to my core.

Something I felt… Then. That night. Chasing… someone. Resting under the stars. The last moments before she was gone. Before they were gone. Before I was alone again, under the stars.

Ophelia.

—————–

“What kind of monster was sleeping in Muro!?” Norman stumbled back, his touhou flanking him protectively as Ophelia smiled behind her fan, taking a step behind Norman. “An ancient, dark thing.” She answered with a measured amount of trepidation added to her voice. “The cultists worshipped that thing as a god… but in truth it’s a demon that preys on human and touhou alike.”

Before her, before them, before Touka, the ground shook. Presence was made manifest, an intent so strong that it flooded the air thick enough to choke. “Stand strong, Norman – You need only hold it off until help arrives.” Ophelia encouraged the gym leader, purposely placing him between herself and the epicenter of the disturbance.

The epicenter… The erupted violently into the air at her words, pale skin and ruby red eyes barely noticeable behind the rapidly expanding black mist that swirled and eroded the ground in a field of sheer power. A wordless scream was Ophelia’s answer, blonde hair lengthening rapidly as it whipped through the wind – Darkness turning and shifting into mass, into skin, into obsidian black claws.

A single red ribbon went spiraling into the sky as darkness blotted out the sun, twin ruby pools radiating menacingly from behind a veil of black.

“OPHELIA…!”

Episode 45: Of siblings, and things better left unsaid.

Not long after the meeting between Flannery and Roxanne started, I had excused myself to escape into Kanazumi. I really didn’t have any reason or want to be stuck listening to the two of them figure out how best to host Fuen’s populace in Kanazumi, and there was very little I could have contributed in the long run.

Blatantly speaking, my talents were arrayed such that if you needed my help for something, you probably had a target or opponent in mind.

Looking up at the stars as I wandered aimlessly through Kanazumi, I decided it was a novel experience to realize that I was still pretty young and inexperienced in a situation where it wasn’t being ruminated on in a negative context. It was also somewhat amusing to realize that Flannery might also be entertaining my usual mantra of ‘I’m too young for this, I don’t know what to do‘ for a while.

In a way, I wondered whose pressures hit harder. I may have gone through some unbelievable things, but all of my troubles generally only involved me. I was responsible for all of myself, and my touhou – That was it. Flannery, on the other hand, was supposed to act the pillar of support for an entire town. As Fuen’s gym leader, people looked to her for protection, leadership, and confidence.

She really was an amazing girl. Put in the same situation, I probably would have snapped. In comparison, I had an entire host of people there to try and help me through my own little crisis’ and I still ended up losing sight of myself.

Then again, her problems didn’t require her to leave her town so…. No, I was trying to justify my own short comings now.

“Mistress?” Cecilia had left with me, following me around customarily through the streets as I wandered. “Hm?” Turning back to her, the silver haired maid seemed to be restraining her wonder of Kanazumi in favor of keeping my company. “Where are we going, exactly?”

“Ah… We’ve been walking around for a while, haven’t we?” Rhetorical questions were silly. And completely lost on Cecilia, if her tilted head was any indication. “… Do you know where the others are?” I decided to change the topic to something more manageable for her.

She repeated ‘others’ questioningly, her eyes lighting up a moment later as she assumed what I could only imagine was her designated ‘official report’ posture – arms held demurely in front, back straight, feet together, direct eye contact.

“Trinity has returned to the Fuen refugees outside of town to keep on guard. Reports of a strange creature living in the cave we crossed through have them on edge. apparently.” I blinked, my vision cutting back the most carefree shadow in the city as it… reached up and yanked a moth out of the air and dragged it into the ground.

“Miku and Fen are…” She paused, “Somewhere. As soon as we entered Kanazumi, they ran into town. I don’t know where they might be now.” her shoulders slumped and I sighed, finding them probably wouldn’t be too hard – I just hoped she didn’t get herself into trouble in the meantime. “Ah, and the vampire has been circling some ways above us at all times.” I looked up curiously, trying to spot Ariel in the starry night sky; to no avail, obviously.

“… You see her?” I squinted, trying to make out a silhouette. “No, however that is where the scavenger always is – Therefor I assume she is there now.”

“… Right.” I continued my aimless walk, deciding it was probably a good time to continue changing the subject. “So, what are your thoughts on Kanazumi, Cecilia?” Having been trapped for so long in Rika’s bamboo forest, modern cities must be interesting.

Her eyes darted from building to building briefly, “It is… large.” She answered carefully, “That such massive structures exist so closely is amazing to me… Though it is hardly as bright as what I saw of Kinsetsu.” I felt my stride stiffen slightly at the mention of Kinsetsu, reminding me that Cecilia still didn’t know I was the one responsible.

Awkwardly I attempted to laugh it off, though her concerned glance made me wonder if I had succeeded. “Kanazumi is pretty big, so its not like every town is like this.” Changing the subject again. It seemed like I did that often with Cecilia. “Sometime soon we’ll be heading towards Minamo – It’s much larger than Kanazumi.” I turned back towards Cecilia with a mischevious grin on my face, casually keeping up my stride walking backwards.

“Minamo is full of massive buildings,” My arms went wide to try and emphasize the sheer size, “They reach waaay up into the sky, and people live and work on every floor.”

I didn’t really like Minamo. I had gone there twice – The first time Mary had snapped at me, and the second time I had lost her to Kodok. Which reminded me, I already knew where Kodok’s base was… Hm.

That was something to do later, but for now – My description of Minamo was meant to be purposefully exaggerated and colorful. The childish look of wonder on Cecilia’s face was my only real goal in talking about it.

It hadn’t been long since I had met her, but she seemed like an entirely different person these days. At first so open, and clumsy – Now every step she took felt like she was devoting all of her concentration to it. Where before she would look at the world around her with open eyes, it felt like she was managing to become more jaded to things than she had any right to be.

It felt that way, but it wasn’t. I don’t think it was, anyway. It wasn’t any kind of natural change, but something she seemed to try and be becoming. The most perfect, elegant maid. Unflappable in all situations, capable of handling anything required of her.

When I had suggested she be my maid, was this what she thought I wanted? What exactly did ‘Maid’ mean to her, anyway? Was it something she decided on after meeting the others?

It was almost unnoticeable- Or maybe it was very noticeable, and I just didn’t see it. How quickly she jumped to take charge of Miku, Fen and Trinity. When I wasn’t around, or when I had needed to focus elsewhere, she had almost instantly taken up my place and began to direct them and mediate between them and myself.

Miku would follow her orders just because she liked her, and Fen followed Miku. Trinity seemed content to do whatever you told her, as long as you had some reasoning behind it. And just like that, I noticed Cecilia supervising them in Kinsetsu for the first time as if it was the most natural thing to do.

Somehow, Cecilia had established a makeshift chain-of-command under my nose. But it was with that chain of command that these changes in her came along…

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that few things bothered me more than my relationship with her. The constant changing of subject, the Master-Servant interaction, the hollow wall that stood between us, masquerading as professionalism…

The strange notion that Cecilia seemed to hold that I expected her to become something that she wasn’t.

Or maybe I was over thinking it all, and she was really just trying the best way she knew how to make me happy.

Or maybe it’s not even about you.

Ariel’s voice drawled from the back of my mind, reminding me almost loathingly that I was being egocentric. That not everything that happened revolved around me, and what I wanted or thought.

———————————

“I can’t wait to see your face when you get there, hehe…” At some point we had gone from walking to relaxing on the edge of a familiar fountain, facing each other while I described Minamo to her. It was probably a bad sign that I could zone out on my own conversation… “Au… Don’t tease me, Mistress!” Cecilia had slumped at my last comment, the desired childishness indicating that my plan was a great success.

I patted her head affectionately, smirking at how dejected she was.  This was definitely the Cecilia I liked best – Open and relaxed.

“Ayanavi?” And just like that, the moment is ruined and Cecilia has scrambled to her feet and slipped back into the role of my maid. With a sigh, I turn to greet my approaching little sister. “… Didn’t expect to see you here.” Of course, she took this chance to apparently become irritated over something.

She was an exceptionally grumpy little sibling.

“I didn’t expect to see you anywhere. What the hell happened after Muro? What happened to that… thing?” I glanced down at my shadow, the light behind me letting it reach naturally across the ground towards Misuto, and wondered briefly about that question.

“I went places.” How exactly do your describe a pseudo-sentient pocket dimension of a god? “Met some people.” How exactly do you describe Trinity and Rika? “…And somehow ended up on top of Mt. Kanazumi.” I made a face at that last bit, “I’m getting tired of ending up on top of Mt. Kanazumi.”

If this kept up, I’d go tear down the mountain just on principle. “And what about you? Didn’t think you’d end up back in Kanazumi.” may as well find out what my little sister had been up to.

She had looked down as well, though whether she was staring at my shadow where Zoey was, or just avoiding eye contact, was something I couldn’t tell. “I heard about that… I was in Fuen when Mt. Chimney blew its lid. “It’s almost like danger follows you around. Or maybe you follow it.” She paused for a second, and I took the opportunity to professionally restrain my urge to snicker at the word ‘danger’.

“I don’t know where you’ve been before that… but I’m going to guess you’ve heard about what’s been happening recently, like in Kinsetsu and… with the volcano god.”

I twitched slightly at the mention of Kinsetsu, going to open my mouth only for Cecilia to quite literally step in – smoothly maneuvering herself partially between myself and my little sister. “My Mistress and I discovered Kinsetsu on path back to Kanazumi, with the rest of Fuen.” I wondered if Cecilia had picked up on just how much that particular topic bothered me, “Though the Gym leader of Fuen seems to believe that the culprit behind it is also responsible for this ‘Muro event’,” the way she said it implied she didn’t really know what it was, “And whatever occurred within the Volcano.”

Oh, which reminded me, “Wasn’t Kalkun sighted in the area?” I broke in curiously, “You have any idea what happened to them?”

“Oh yeah, them,” my little sister stumbled a little, apparently finding my question a welcome change of subject from Cecilia stepping in. “I took care of them – but moreover, they were trying to awaken the volcano god. I thought they had failed, but…” She shrugged, as if to say ‘woops, my bad’.

I smirked at that, “So you punted Maxie off the volcano?” the image of my otherwise mild mannered little sister actively fighting off Kalkun was hilarious. I had kind of wondered what happened to them, since I never went to deal with them. Guess being a pain in the ass to random terrorist organizations was a family trait. “Good job, lil sis!”

“Hah, I totally did. If it weren’t for his Utsuho though, he wouldn’t have sur-” She paused, immediately going from proud of herself to being irritated again for no discernible reason, “Oh for fuck’s sake, I’m not your si-” I decided to change the subject before she could get off topic and start ranting about something.

I’m getting good at changing the subject.

Finally I stood up and stepped up next to Cecilia to stretched lazily. “So, you never said what brought you back to Kanazumi.” The words had their intended effect as she shut up almost immediately, face donning an interesting expression of… something. Was she concerned or something?

“Well, you already know about it – but I don’t think anyone else saw it. The volcano god.” she started seriously, and that statement alone explained her presence here. “Everyone needs to be told – that thing will seriously fuck shit up!” she spread her arms like I had done earlier to amuse Cecilia – Only she seemed to take her arm spreading very seriously. “I was on my way back to tell Roxanne, and then dad… Between them and the entire boneka league, they have to do something!”

Oh.

Oh.

Well, that was an entirely more dramatic course of action than I thought she’d take. Getting the entire league after that Last Word Utsuho? How the hell was I supposed to take it down if everyone else after it too? I’d start running into blockades and restricted areas and… No, this was not good.

“That’s… Not good.” And I said as much, trying to think up some way to dissuade her from making a big fuss out of i- Oh, nevermind. Flannery already knew about it. She’d probably tell Roxanne. Roxanne would report it. Fuck. “Well… On a scale of ‘okay let’s go’ to ‘are you mad’, where would you rank an offer to go god hunting?” I offered, half jokingly.

Half.

“Could be fun! Like Muro was!” I stopped, “…Do you still have that fairy thing with you, by the way?” I asked suspiciously, glancing around her warily.

Her eye twitched, “Are you…” She stopped, apparently rebooting her train of thought, “What the hell do you mean by ‘fun’?! At Muro, both of us almost -died-… It took me a long damned time to figure out that you actually didn’t! We had to fight through an entire island of fish men, fight an entire cult of freaks, and…”

She stopped again, apparently this train of thought was simply too stressful.

“And uh, Mira is still around, yes.” almost distractedly she answered in the worst possible way, “…But that’s beside the point! Are you really considering just going after that thing?”

“If you let that goddamned little light socket out around me, I will punt it over Mt. Kanazumi.” I answered bluntly, probably one of the most serious expressions I’ve ever worn on my face. The last thing I needed was for the fucking thing to make Zoey flip out again – Especially in Kanazumi.

She flinched, I didn’t care, damn that little fairy.

“As for going after her…” I trailed off momentarily, looking at Cecilia, then up to the sky to see if I could catch sight of Ariel on some off chance. Naturally I didn’t. “Yeah, probably.” I shrugged, this had been my plan for a while now. “She escaped last time…” Cecilia muttered at my side, “I will not let it happen again.”

We both looked at Cecilia, I hadn’t actually planned on telling her that we had fought Utsuho before… “It’s obviously a mistake at this point to consider anything you do sensible. I don’t know what world you are from, or think you are from, but,” I turned my attention back to Misuto, catching the tail end of her smirk, “You go ahead and do whatever the hell you want. But I’ll be damned if you try to tell me to stay out of it this time. You might die again.”

“… Die?” I parroted rhetorically, holding up my hand curiously, quickly identifying and feeling the flow of power under my skin. “…No, I don’t think I can die like this.” I shrugged carelessly, “Not anymore, anyway.” I turned to Cecilia, “Can you go gather the others? We’ll meet up at the Eirin center later tonight.”

The silver haired maid seemed to hesitate for a moment, looking between Misuto and myself warily. I smiled and jerked my head off to the side, finally eliciting a sigh from the maid as she bowed her head and turned to leave with a quiet “Yes, Mistress.”

“So,” I continued, turning back to Misuto, “About dad, when are you heading back there?”

“I was going to leave as soon as possible – probably right at dawn tomorrow morning.” she responded thoughtfully, “We could probably make it there by noon, at best, if we leave that early.”

So getting back to Dad’s was pretty high priority for her. I guess that makes sense, especially if she had managed to get a badge from Flan’. I assume she did, anyway.

“How cozy, dad’s going to get a family reunion.” I snarked sarcastically, “Bet he’ll be thrilled to see his precious kids on his doorstep.” Yeah… I know I was going to be pleased to be on his doorstep again. It was Maze ‘Stompin Time.

“Well, I’ll see ya around then, lil sis.” I waved lackadaisically over my shoulder at her as I walked away, one hand stuffed lazily in my pocket. “Meet at the gates in the morning?”

I didn’t actually stop to hear if she had said yes or not – It wasn’t all that important. Part of me wanted to leave in the middle of the night just to get to dad’s place first and wreck his gym… I doubted my little sister was as blunt as I was about solving mazes, and she’d probably nag at me if I just tried to break through it forcibly.

My other options including just leaving earlier – This was stupid, as I hated getting up early – or leaving later and just waltzing through his gym at my own leisure. Except that would give Utsuho more time to recover, and the league more time to organize.

… Yeah, that was another thing, wasn’t it? The League was going to be organizing to take on Last Word Utsuho soon. I had quite suddenly been thrown into a race against time to tackle the recently awoken volcano god that I let get away.

———————————-

Finally reaching the outside edge of town, I sat down tiredly and laid back against a tree. If we were going to take on Utsuho, then we would need more power than we had now… And now, thanks to the league getting involved, I didn’t have the time to gather it at my leisure anymore… Which meant it was time to start digging in and making use of every tool at my disposal.

“Zoey.” finally, I spoke up, watching my own shadow darken into visibility in the night as it rose off the ground and took the form of a blonde haired girl in a dress. “You called Zoey~?” red eyes shown in the night, a single red ribbon tied in her hair and coated in moonlight.

Her wide eyes were curious, inquisitive and taking in the world just as openly as ever.  “Remember when I asked you what your power felt like?” I ventured after a deep breath, “Zoey remembers~” she smiled strangely, “It was a silly question, Zoey feels like Zoey after all~”

I laughed at her simplistic explanation, exhaling that same deep breath I had just taken to try and calm myself down for what I was about to do. “Right, but I… don’t know what you feel like.” I began in a stumbling manner, “And I feel something inside me. Something that wasn’t there before.” How exactly do you explain thi- “Zoey feels strange human too~” She chirped carelessly, “Strange human feels strange~”

. . . “Oh.” I wasn’t entirely sure how to respond to that. Whatever Zoey was talking about obviously wasn’t affecting her like what I was talking about affected me. “Right… uh…” And there went my preparation for this. “Listen, I don’t know what this weird power I’ve been feeling lately is, but since we’re strapped for time with Utsuho, I need to find out what it is – And figure out how to use it.” I explained quickly, building up momentum so I didn’t have enough time to stop even if I wanted to.

“So I… Kind of need to know what you feel like.” There, I blurted it out. “And… How you do… whatever it is you do to make your power work like it does.” This was definitely not making this any less awkward, “So I don’t accidentally lost control again, like I did in Kinsetsu, when we.. um…”

“Hm… Zoey doesn’t really understand, but Zoey will try her best~” she seemed confused by the entire conversation, but overall accepting of it. It was good to know it was just awkward on my side to ask Zoey if I could find out what she felt like. I guess now it just came down to working together and meditation to contact my inner power or somethi-

I blinked, broken out of my thoughts as Zoey’s face loomed closer to mine, “Become one with Zoey~!” I opened my mouth to frantically ask just what she meant by that, heat flushing into my cheeks as her breath brushed against my nose.

“Z-Zoey..?” I couldn’t back up against the tree any further than I had, and my voice come out more as a trembling, high pitched squeak as her body melded to mine under the night sky. “W-W-Wait, what are you-”

“Zoey will teach you…” she hummed playfully, “exactly what Zoey feels like.”

I remember panicking at some point. I’m not sure if I started panicking when Zoey started saying such suggestive things and pinned me against the tree, or if I started panicking when I found myself melting into Zoey’s petite body and entering the same place I had been during the fight with Utsuho.

“Zoey..? Zoey…!?” I whipped my head from side to side, trying to locate the exit in this eldritch existence, the formerly mentioned panic setting in quite quickly as my brain registered my presence in one of the ‘Places I Refuse To Enter’ and flipped the fuck out in proper fashion.

I just recovered from this! This was not what I meant! I did not want this!

“Hey.”

A shadowy, long blonde haired version of myself manifested in front of me, familiar ruby eyes glinting in the darkness, complimenting the wicked set of fangs my doppleganger so proudly sported in a predatory manner. Her skin seemed to alternate between healthy human and dark whisps of blackness that trailed along the body not unlike fog.

I did what any self respecting human being would do in this situation – I screamed.

Or I tried to, but then my mouth was sealed and those familiar ruby eyes were so close…

Episode 44: Monster is a relative term.

I was quite fond of calling Ophelia a monster. For a long time now, I had considered her to be a rare sort of unrepentable, true evil that existed purely to be some type of cosmic jackass to anyone she laid her eyes on. From prior experience with my little sister, I had gathered that other people found this perspective to be strange.

“Oh my god…”

It’s okay, I understood that. If I hadn’t been on the receiving end of her asshattery then I would have just brushed off the story as the ravings of some weird person with paranoia. A dimension manipulating goddess who exists purely to antagonize you? Please, that was just being childish.

“Someone go keep the children out of here… Lead them around.”

But yes, I was quite used to considering and vocalizing my belief that if complete, irredeemable monsters existed in this world – Ophelia would be one of them.

“What kind of monster could have done this…?” Flannery muttered a few feet ahead of me, surveying the remains of Kinsetsu with a shell shocked expression, as if she simply couldn’t believe what she was staring at.

It was probably because I had seen this scene twice before that I didn’t find it all that strange. Of course, both times it had more or less been me who caused it – It’s hard to be horrified by things you’ve done. Still, to have someone else come in and call you a monster because of it? Monster was a term reserved for someone like Ophelia.

“I heard about this… No one escaped.”
“In a single night, this city got swallowed by something…”
“Like what happened with Muro?”

I felt my fingers twitch as the residents of Fuen walked past us, through the ruined city and onward to the neighboring town of Shidake. Their gossip was starting to irritate me. “When I was hunting this loser down, I saw whatever happened to this town.” Ariel chimed in, having descended to join Flannery and I as we paused in the center of Kinsetsu.

Flannery’s attention turned instantly upon her, eyes shining with an interesting mix of curiosity and fire. I felt something unsettling in my stomach at the very sight of it. “So you know what it was? Did you see what it was?”

“It was the same thing that ate Muro.” She responded, cutting her eyes to me unreadably, “It looked like the night itself just decided to blot out Kinsetsu. There was a tidal wave of black… and then nothing but screaming.” She shook her head, ascending lightly. Flannery seemed to hang on these words though, and like the unexplained bad feeling in me, I saw her motivation growing.

“Muro and Kinsetsu…It’s got to be the same thing that came out of the volcano after that massive Utsuho.” She clenched her fist, turning to me determinedly. “Aya… Please! Help me get strong enough to defeat that thing!”

Fuck.

“Mistress!” And I had never been more thankful for Cecilia than now, her timing managing to save me from having an extremely awkward conversation that I would probably be spending the better part of this trip avoiding. “Mistress!”, She finally caught up with us, taking a moment to catch her breath before continuing, “Miku and I managed to find some food and other supplies in the buildings! We went ahead and gathered them up as best we could.” She stood straight now, hands crossed in front of her demurely as she gave her report.

It was odd seeing Cecilia being so confident. Unlike Ariel, who would stay as headstrong as she pleased regardless of what you thought, Cecilia’s attitude was almost entirely dependant on the opinions of those around her. If you doubted her, she would falter – If you praised her, she would light up brilliantly with a smile… But even the smallest of teasings and she’d crumble.

When she had begged to come with me, going so far as volunteering to be a slave if she could come, I had originally just tossed out ‘be my maid’ as an excuse. She took it very seriously, and had taken on every possible chore she could think of with an enthusiasm that was slightly unnerving.

It was strange, to think that she was this willing to devote herself to someone who she just met by chance. If it hadn’t of been me, she likely would have done the exact same thing to any other person to wander into Rika’s forest… And the more I thought of that, the less genuine her devotion seemed. It was like a nagging voice in every action – ‘It could have been anyone.’

And it bothered me. Whether Cecilia personally liked me or not, the thought of her devoting herself like she had to me to anyone else, just because they had been there… It felt dirty. I hated it.

“How should we distribute it, Mistress?” I glanced to Flannery to see if she had any thoughts on Cecilia’s report, and finding the red haired girl had walked off shortly after Cecilia arrived, I could only sigh. “…Mistress? Are you feeling well?” Cecilia’s pale hand reached out in concern, eliciting a small smile in return.

“Sorry, just thinking.” About a lot of things. “Send Miku to find Trinity, she should be done leading the kids around Kinsetsu by now. If she’s free, get her to come help gather the supplies – We’ll hand them out outside of Kinsetsu before moving on to Shidake.” Cecilia nodded, “I’ll start now!” she turned to leave almost immediately.

“Ah- Cecilia!” She turned instantly, “… Good job. Don’t overburden yourself, your fingers are still healing.” Yes, Cecilia was almost entirely dependent on the opinions of those around her. If you trusted her… If you believed in her… If you showed you even remotely cared about her…

She blushed, looking down and quickly stashing her bandaged hands behind her back. “I-I’m fine, Mistress! I’ll do my best!” She bowed quickly and rushed away a bit more excitedly this time.

“She’ll work herself to exhaustion…” I muttered resignedly, making a note to try and check in on her later. Whether her devotion to me something she’d have given anyone who had saved her, I refused to entertain the idea of letting someone else abuse that kind of blind faith. Turning away from the direction Cecilia had departed in, I found Ariel watching the silver haired maid depart with blatant venom in her eyes.

Ariel was a different matter entirely. Her allegiance was entirely her own – And whether you wanted it or not, she was extremely picky about who she’d respect. “Done talking to your dog?” And Cecilia was apparently not on that list. “She’s not a dog, Ariel.” And for whatever reason, the two of them really didn’t get along.

At all.

She sniffed disdainfully and jerked her eyes away from the retreating maid. “With how she wags her tail, you could have fooled me.” It was a relationship that I didn’t really understand, but Cecilia was just as vindictive to her as she was to Cecilia. Whenever the two got together, it was just a tense  situation. “Dog aside…” Ariel broke into my thoughts, “Just what happened here…?”

Having reunited with her, I had given Ariel an overview of what had happened since we parted ways – She was one of the few people who knew that Muro and Kinsetsu were caused by Zoey and I. For that matter, she was also one of the only ones who knew the truth about the Mt. Kanazumi volcano incident.

Of these things, she only knew the details of the last one. With the looming fight against the Last Word Utsuho on our minds, there hadn’t been proper time to really explain to her the situations leading up to the other two massacres. I was hesitant, honestly, to tell her about the other ones.

There were no climactic clashes with gods to spark them. It was just overkill – Pure and simple.

“In Muro, we found out the extent of Zoey’s power. In order to escape an island full of cult fishfreaks… It was probably the only reliable option. To just let her have free reign and destroy them.” I took the moment to explain Muro, “It was my little sister and I at the time, and its not like the ability to survive this craziness runs in the family.” I shrugged half heartedly.

Yes, I was definitely going to rationalize the complete genocide of Muro on me being a protective older sister. And the fish freaks.

Rationalizations didn’t help Ariel trust Zoey, though. It was probably natural to be inherently distrustful or wary of something so much more powerful than you, or something had such an alien existence – Really, the fact I trusted Zoey was probably a short coming in my own survival instinct. Or a result of the bond we had developed.

Probably both.

As far as I knew, neither of these things extended to Ariel – Who treated the blonde girl living in my shadow as some kind of tactical nuke just waiting to be set off. Or perhaps a sleeping monster that was liable to wake up if you poked it.  It wasn’t the same kind of hate she held for Cecilia, but the kind of agitation you see when asking a predator to work alongside something directly above it on the food chain.

“So what happened here?” Ariel crossed her arms, “You’re avoiding the question, loser. If you think waking up and taking on a god is just something you plan for, then why would you try and skirt this?”

Unlike Cecilia, Ariel was a stubborn and prideful touhou. She was stunning, brutal, elegant, and blunt. With her, there was never any room for excuses or lies – She would chase down anything she wanted, and by the end of the day she’d have her way. It was something I had to learn the hard way; That no matter what you thought, she would decide whether something was for the best for her not.

… But even if Ariel didn’t my approval like Cecilia did, that hardly meant that I was as strong without hers. The blonde vampire would think for herself, she held her own set of morals and ethics, and to hell with whether they agreed with everyone else’ or not… And whether those ethics would accept what happened here or not was something I didn’t know.

Something I was quite honestly afraid to find out.

“If we lost to Utsuho, we could just retreat.” I shoved my hands in my pockets and walked towards Shidake, “If what I did makes me lose you, then that’d probably be worse.” I shrugged hopefully, deliberately avoiding eye contact with her. “So I’d rather not talk about it, really…”

Yes, if she were anyone else I could have left it at that and walked off in a subdued manner and the subject would have been dropped. “Too bad!” She was not anyone else, “You’re going to fess up right here, right now, about what the hell happened here.” She was Ariel, that stubborn and vicious vampire touhou that more or less acted as a pillar of support in my life. For better or worse. “Like hell I’m letting you just walk off after that, so what the hell’s got you so worried?!”

She was quick. Quick enough to cut off my escape route near instantly. “I’ll decide whether or not it’s important, but you aren’t going anywhere until you tell me!” Fierce eyes. It didn’t matter who she argued with, there was no backing down.

Pick a path. No regrets. Once she decided on a course of action, there was nothing to stop her.

“It’s nothing amazing.” I muttered sheepishly, “It was just… bright.” And that was really the extent of the reasoning behind everyone in Kinsetsu being murdered and eaten.

“…Bright.” Ariel repeated flatly.

“… Yeah. It was really bright.”

“You allowed an entire city to be massacred because it was bright.”

I scratched my cheek as a nervous tick, doing my best to actively avoid having to think too deeply on Kinsetsu. I never actually came to terms with it myself after it happened, and I still wasn’t too keen on trying to confront it.

“… You don’t give a damn about other people, do you?” Ariel finally uttered, drifting back away from me with a strange face. “Fuen… Kinsetsu… You don’t even think about how the things you do affect the people around you.” She paused- “No, it’s not even that. You don’t think about other people at all, do you?”

Wilted isn’t an accurate description of how I’m reacting. It’s as accurate as saying Ophelia annoys me, or that Last Word Utsuho was kind of strong – That is to say, the general meaning is there, but it’s hilariously understated.

“I-I do..!” My outraged mental rejection of her accusations came out more along the lines of a pitiful mewl, “I’ve been… I mean, Ophelia was… We were..” I fumbled for words to explain myself under her unflinching golden eyes, “… It was an accident, okay? I lost control!”

“… Hmph.” Ariel sighed, “Listen, you selfish loser.” I flinched, “I don’t know what you think you lost control of, but don’t you dare make excuses to me.” She crossed her arms, “If you screw up, its your fault. Everything you do is your fault, no one elses – Not your little ‘sister’, not that gap-bitch’s, yours.”

“…And against my better judgement, I trust you.” I risked glancing up, but she was still scowling at me. A thoughtful scowl, but displeased all the same. “Even though the more I learn about you, the more I’m convinced that you’re not even human…” She locked gazes with me, searching for something she couldn’t quite find.

Slowly she blinked, shaking her head and turned to ascend back into the sky. “Let’s go loser, we still need to get to Kanazumi today.”

Not even human…?

I glanced down at my shadow, which stood as still as I did in the midday sun – At least until it seemed to perk up and turn to look at me in curiosity, almost asking ‘did you need me?’ as the arms moved on their own to wave at me from the ground.

No, this probably wasn’t human. But how much of it was Zoey?

…No, that’s the wrong question. Zoey was Zoey, I was Myself. What I should have been asking wasn’t how much of this inhuman feeling was Zoey, “…But how much of it is me?” I held my hand up, free of its shadow, and stared at the palm blankly. I didn’t want to confront that familiar alien feeling inside me that bubbled to the surface back then, and I didn’t want to confront it now – So I won’t.

But it’s there. It’s definitely there. I could feel it even now, running through my veins – hiding just beneath my skin.

I’d almost call it a monster. If only… If only the sight of my shadow curiously watching me didn’t remind me of the lonely blonde girl who was currently living in my shadow. This feeling was the same as my connection to Ariel had been, it was no more a monster than Zoey was.

It was power. Dark, bubbling power that carried latent blood lust and madness along its’ back. From the moment Zoey had gained her EX form back then, this growing black inside of me had ceased being hers – It was mine. My own latent power, gained from our connection.

And it was growing a long with me.

“Zoey?”
“Hm~?”
“… How do you feel, normally?”
“Zoey doesn’t understand~”

I scratched my head and squatted down to look closer at my shadow, as if it would blurt out an answer. “Your power, how your abilities work… What does that feel like?”

“Ha~? It feels like Zoey~!” she answered straight forwardly, “Zoey always feels like Zoey, because Zoey is Zoey~”

I sighed, “Is that so…?” Of course, to her it’d be as natural as breathing or eating. “That is so~” My shadow smiled at me – How did it managed to get sunlight through where my teeth should be? – and seemed to find the entire conversation silly. “You’re a strange human~”

“Yeah, well you’re a strange… uh… Zoey.”
“Is that so~?”
“That is so.”
“You know other Zoey’s!? But Zoey is Zoey!”

I smirked, the conversation cheering me up a little – As well as giving me more to think about. This thing inside me may as well have been a monster, but it was my fault that it was that way. It was unnatural, and I hadn’t even cared to acknowledge it’s existence – Much less grow accustomed to it. Left ignored and and neglected, no wonder it had exploded beyond my control when it was finally able to reach the surface.

“There can be only one Zoey…”

I’d have to properly deal with it later. My first goal was to get Flannery and the rest of Fuen to Kanazumi – After that, I could deal with the rest of this weirdness.

“Zoey will murder other Zoeys…”

I sighed, clapping my hands as I stood back up and started jogging to catch up with Flannery and the rest – In the distance, Trinity and Cecilia were already helping Flannery portion up the supplies they had found.

Now that we were past Kinsetsu, the trip to Kanazumi should be over with by nightfall.

———————————–

Later that night, Roxanne and a team of trainers met the entire town of Fuen, led by Flannery and I, at the outskirts of Kanazumi.

“I told you forcibly busting a hole through the tunnel was a bad idea…” Flannery muttered from beside me, a sentiment I shrugged off carelessly. “We would have had to get stop outside anyway. I doubt they’d just let a big mob waltz into town.”

“Aya!” Roxanne moved towards the two of us, as we strode out to the middle ground. “When you said you would be here soon, I didn’t think you’d try and come through the Shidake tunnel… I take it that commotion about explosions in the tunnel was your doing?”

“ehehe… Sorry.” I ducked my head lamely under her scolding, “You know how dangerous that could have been, Aya? Caves have a tendency to collapse if you try to tunnel through them improperly – You put yourself and those poor people behind you in danger!”

“Don’t worry, Ma’am.” Roxanne turned to look at the owner of the voice who had suddenly interrupted her scolding, “I was the one doing most of the digging, and I can guarantee my abilities! It’s a survival skill I picked up…”

—————

I blinked and Roxanne was setting across from Flannery and I in her gym, cups of tea setting in our hands while Trinity thanked Cecilia for her help in making the tea somewhere off to the side. “A-Ah…” Roxanne started, looking between Trinity and myself curiously, “When did we…?”

“It’s normal.” I assured her, sipping the tea curiously, subtly nudging Flannery’s foot, “More importantly, Roxanne? This is Flannery – Gym leader of Fuen city.” Since I knew them both, I went ahead with the introductions, “Flannery, this is Roxanne.”

“And this is… very good tea.” Roxanne muttered, turning to Cecilia who had taken up her station behind me with a small smile. “May I ask what flavor it is?”

“Ah, Poh-San-Soo-Mahk.” Cecilia answered confidently, “I was surprised to find some in this region.”

. . .

I spit out my tea.

Episode 43: Regrouping and Refugees.

“Hey.” Rika’s voice cut through the haze of my mind trying to pull itself back together, a surprising visit from a person I hadn’t expected to see for a very long time. A detached part of me realized she had taken a drag from her cigarette – I could hear the taste of smoke on my skin… Which probably didn’t say anything good about my state of mind right now – before she vocalized her judgement of me. “You look like shit.”

She sniffed dismissively, and I tried to say something in my defense-
“Ir Gl’rith, eicthuga.”
-But it came out just as garbled as ever. Well this was pitiful.

With a sigh, Rika yanked me up in one hand and proceeded to clench her cigarette in the side of her mouth as her arm cocked back. One grunt later, and I was duly aware of my body making a casual arc through the air and then crashing headlong into what was probably the same tree I was just laying against.

“Hell’s your problem?!” I rocked up onto my feet in an instant, shock at suddenly being hit swiftly replaced by growing anger, which was subsequently replaced almost instantly by realizing I could speak english again. “…” I slipped my attention back to Rika as she took a drag and exhaled a puff of smoke carelessly.

“So,” she started lackadaisically, “Imagine my surprise when I come looking for you, only to catch you waking up one of the physical goddesses of this world by trying to beat her into the ground.” Rika’s smirk was exasperated as she shrugged, shaking her head unbelievably, “One of these days, your suicidal tendencies are going to catch up to you.”

“Yeah, well…” Oh god this headache was bad. I think I preferred not feeling it. “Screw you.”

“That an offer?” Her brow arched in a way that I couldn’t readily tell whether she was curious or sarcastic – Neither answer boded well, in any case. I decided to change the topic. “So why are back out here?” I took the time to figure out where I was while we talked, a semi-comforting fact was that I wasn’t that far from Fuen. However, that meant I was still relatively close to an active volcano. “Last time we met, you said you couldn’t interfere.”

“Didn’t stop me last time.” She shot back lazily, “Besides, you went and picked a fight with a goddess of fire and expected me to not show up?” She paused for a second, “Tch,” she muttered something to herself before setting her hands on her hips confrontationally and meeting my eyes with a fierce kind of laziness.

“What’s important now is whether you plan on having a round two with that bird brained bitch.” Rika jerked her thumb off in the distance, in what I could only assume was the direction she flew off in, “’cause I want in on this.”

She what.
“You What.”

“Listen,” Rika removed the cigarette from her her mouth, holding it haphazardly inbetween her fingers, “We’re stuck here until Ophelia and you are done with your little game. I don’t know if you’ve noticed yet, but there’s exactly two things to do in this world: Fuck, and nothing.” She pointed the cigarette at me as if thrusting a sword of accusation, “I can’t interfere with you and her without people gettin’ uppity ’bout it, but the moment you go and start punching out gods is when I get interested, here.”

I blinked and shook my head, “You hunted me down to help me pick a fight with Goddesses?” I asked incredulously, not quite believing my ears.

“Yeah.” Rika answered languidly, smoke escaping her mouth when I’m almost sure she hadn’t taken a drag from her cigarette, “That is exactly why I’m here.” She took a drag, “No way in hell am I lettin’ you take all th’ fun of punting these assholes off their pedestals.”

“…Fine, suit yourself.” I conceded with a smirk, my confidence about taking on these gods was definitely increasing – Utsuho was already running from us, with Rika on our side then this would be a sealed deal. “I’m definitely not just letting her run off, so we’ll end up fighting again.” I cracked my knuckles, more for effect than anything else, “Next time, she won’t be running.”

“Mistress!”
“Loser!”

My conversation with Rika aside, I turned in time to greet a flying silver haired maid slamming directly into my chest – which, in turn, slammed me back into the tree I had hit twice now. “You’re okay! I was so worried when Trinity made us leave!” Awkwardly, I rubbed her head while steadying myself. Glancing at Rika seemed to indicate she had lost interest in our conversation upon the arrival of new people, and was already setting down on the ground with a fresh cigarette in her hand.

“Hey, Cecilia.” The silver haired girl was gripping me tightly with her face buried into my shoulder, “I’m fine, Zoey was with me.” Pushing her back a little, I managed to turn and face Ariel and the others as they approached.

“That volcano bird got away.” Ariel piped up irritably, “You okay?” I shrugged at her backhanded concern, “More or less, did you guys make it out all right?”

It was a short reunion that acted more as a regrouping. Our strategy had gone off flawlessly, and in the end we managed to come out on top. We had essentially just taken on a goddess and won.

The reactions varied. I was confident about everything, seeing as how I’d already done something like it before – Miku was even more excited than usual, it looked like a fight like that really got her energetic. Fen had been passed out in Miku’s arms since she got back, the whole thing must have been too much for the little touhou. Trinity was pumped over the whole ordeal, if anything it looked like it just made her ready to do it again. Zoey was as care free as ever, she was probably just disappointed that she hadn’t managed to eat the massive Utsuho…

That left Cecilia and Ariel.

Cecilia had yet to leave my side since we regrouped – Which is just as well, considering it gave me time to tend to her injuries more thoroughly. The cuts on her hands and fingers weren’t terribly deep, but it was numerous that she may have well just stripped back the skin on her hands in general.  It was closer to night now, and both of her hands had been wrapped in in torn off pieces of that cloak Utsuho had dropped earlier.

Using the eldritch clothing of a slumbering archaic volcano goddess as bandages was okay, right?

She had fallen asleep shortly afterwards, the stress of fighting Utsuho combined with the day in general finally taking its’ toll on her. People, and touhou for that matter, simply weren’t meant for the kind of conflict we just went through.

“… You’re insane.” Ariel sat across the small fire we had made, it looked like out of everyone she was having the hardest time coming to terms with the results of our fight. “That wasn’t just some random touhou, you had us wake up a goddess and then fight her.”

“And we won.” I added helpfully, a smirk on my face as Cecilia shifted against my shoulder in her sleep.

“No one but that doll is even phased by this, don’t they understand what the hell just happened? We’re upsetting the natural order of life by flipping off deities and then kicking them out of their homes!”

“Scared?” I arched an eyebrow at her, watching the reaction as if she had just been slapped.

“Like hell I am!” She snapped back archly, “Now that I see how stupid you are, you’re likely to get yourself killed if I’m not around to look out for you.” the blonde vampire crossed her arms across from me with a smirk that mirrored mine.

The moment was interrupted by the sound of that weird phone thing I got from Devon corp. going off.

“Aya? Are you okay?” Flannery’s voice rang through the otherside of the phone, “Oh thank god, after the Volcano went up and that touhou and black thing came out, I was afraid you had gotten hurt…”

Ah… Ehehehe… Oops. “No, I’m fine. I managed to skirt the outside of it.”

“Ah, your brother will be relieved… I only wish Fuen had gotten so lucky.”

“Huh?” I didn’t have a brother.. “Flan, I don’t have any brothers… And what happened to Fuen?”

“But he looked just like you… Oh it doesn’t matter. Fuen was in the path of the volcano when it erupted… We just barely managed to evacuate everyone on time.” Flannery’s voice effectively removed any warmth in the air as I felt the high I was riding from my victory against Utsuho begin to crumble, “I’ve got the refugees from Fuen gathered together a little ways from town, if you come back this way you’ll probably see us.”

I felt my blood go cold as Flannery’s voice cracked, her tone lowering to almost a whisper.

“Please come back…”

————————–

And that’s how I ended up looking over the ruined Fuen city in the dead of night, a mixture of self loathing and inarticulate rage boiling under my skin as clenched fists caused my skin to shine white under pressure. “Aya…” Ariel floated next to me, her eyes narrowed in calculation I had seen before, “Flannery said there weren’t any casualites, right? It’s just houses.”

I nodded, taking as much comfort in those words as I could while surveying the damage. Houses or not, their homes were gone… And even if they rebuilt it, it still wouldn’t change the fact that this was my fault.

“Let’s keep going.” I muttered,descending into the ruined town as we made our way  towards the lights in the distance that I assumed to be Flannery’s refugee camp. I could spend time angsting over this… Or I could blame Utsuho for it and wage a warpath on her.

…But I had done that enough. It was time for me to start accepting the consequences of my actions, and not running from responsibility. In this case, it just meant I’d need to try and help fix what I broke- But at the same time, if I left that Last Word Utsuho alone too long, it could recover and become a threat to more people. And what was my little sister doing here?

My eyes narrowed in resolve as my steps found a purpose and a goal.

“Trinity, Miku, I need you to break as much of this cooled magma as possible. Look for any salvageable supplies you can grab on short notice.” I pivoted on my heel, the cooling embers of My. Kanazumi highlighting my form in the dark as I swept my arm out demandingly, “Zoey, lay out that cloak in the center – We’re going to pile everything we can find into it. Ariel,”

I turned to the golden eyed vampire at my side, briefly taking refuge in the confidence her presence gave me in this situation, remembering the last time I had looked up at her at night in Fuen city.

“I need you in the sky. Tell me if you see anything dangerous or useful.” She nodded deftly, immediately ascending while I turned back to Fuen and looked around to see where I could get to work.  “Not going to give me an order?” Rika drawled sarcastically, taking a drag on her cigarette in the night, “No.” I responded dismissively, cracking my neck as I walked over to a structure’s roof and pulled out my phone, “This is my problem.”

Several rings later, a sleepy voice picked up on the other end. “A-Aya? Oh my, it’s almost three in the morning. Are you okay?”

“Sorry about waking you up, Roxanne, but I’ve got a big favor to ask you.

———————–

It was roughly sunrise by the time I actually made it to Flannery’s refugee camp, and I would have felt so awesome waltzing up to them with the dawn at my back if I wasn’t duly aware that it was my fault they were like this in the first place.

“A-Aya..!” Flannery met me at the edge, having stayed up through the night to keep watch with her touhou. “You came back! It got late and you never came, so I thought…”

I managed to force a smirk on my face, as careless as the one Rika perpetually wore, as I reached out and ruffled the red headed girl’s hair affectionately. “Call me and I’ll come, Flan.” stepping up directly in front of her, I wrapped my arms around the girl more out of my own silent apology than to comfort her. “I don’t know what to do, Aya…” She barely
“I’ve got to be the leader now, but I have no idea where to go.”

Yes, it would have been so awesome if I had been as cool as to be able to step back and go ‘don’t worry, leave it to me!’ and then single handedly rescued her and her camp from this little mess.

It’s funny how things rarely seem as impressive as you’d think they were when you’re doing them. It’s always a wish you could have done more, or trying to scrape by.

We didn’t end up finding any supplies that had been spared by the lava, and in the end it was a useless attempt. Even the personal belongings were torched. All we had managed through a night of solid work was the location of a stream for clean water and a idea of where to go from here.

I didn’t even like where we were going, but this wasn’t time to be skittish about backtracking.

“I asked a favor from a friend.” I whispered somberly, “If you’re okay with it, then Kanazumi is prepared to accept Fuen’s populace as refugees.” Flannery froze, looking up at me as if expecting me to start laughing and go ‘ha, just kidding! you’re fucked!’, but all she would get was my tired expression. “As the Gym leader of Fuen, you have the right to formally request the closest city for aid…  I think this qualifies. I’ve already contacted Kanazumi’s gym leader about it.”

“Aya, y-you…”

I squeezed her shoulder reassuringly, keeping eye contact as I choked back my own urge to just angst and apologize in favor of acting like a support column. “No, you.” I corrected gently, “You’re the Gym leader of Fuen. You lead these people. No matter what you decide, I’ll help you.”

——————–

I keep making these kinds of promises.
‘No matter what’, I say. ‘I’ll help you.’
You would think that with my history of failures, I’d have realized by now that I’m not even partially capable of keeping these promises.

But I refused to sit by and let things happen on their own. Not when I can do something. Anything.

I will not just let come what will.

————————–

“Alright everyone…!” Flannery addressed the waking refugees confidently, and from my position behind her I felt nothing but pride for the woman she would grow to be, “We’re going south through Kinsetsu – I’ve arranged for us to enter Kanazumi!” Confident, commanding, charismatic… Flannery, if I were half the woman you are…

——————

I resolved then. Revenge, my own problems… Between my friends and touhou, and my own self-centered childishness…

If the world saw fit to throw misery and misfortune their way, then it would have to go through me first. If it happened to simply be their fate to suffer…

Then I would change that fate myself.

Episode 42: Getting The Last Word.

“What exactly are we looking for?” Cecilia piped up as I stared at a wall of rock in front of me – I had been staring at and pacing back and forth for the better part of ten minutes now. This is where I remember the entrance to Utsuho’s cavern was… But for some reason it just wasn’t here.

“Kalkun probably hasn’t excavated it yet…” I mumbled, more to myself than to answer Cecilia’s question. Ariel was watching me intently from the air, and whether she spoke up or not I got the feeling that she was judging this particular moment as to whether I was horribly eccentric or telling the truth that night.

Best not to disappoint, but this could cause some issues.

“Utsuho’s cavern is deeper inside the mountain, there’s probably a series of tunnels that extend out from it.” I stepped back from my inspection and began to explain to my gathered touhou,  “If we want to get to her, we’ll have to bust our way in ourselves.”

“And how do you propose we ‘bust’ our way through who knows how much solid rock?” Ariel questioned archly, “Should I go punch it?”

“I’m sure Mistress has a plan…” Cecilia retorted sharply, turning loyal eyes to me with a questioning stare, “Right?”

I stared at them for a second before shrugging, “Actually I’m not sure. Last time I tried this, Kalkun had already made a convenient tunnel directly to Utsuho, so this wasn’t an issue.”  I wasn’t sure if Cecilia’s expression was dismay or betrayal, but Ariel was certainly torn between making a snide remark at Cecilia and making a snide remark at myself. You could almost feel the indecision in her posture. “So,” I decided to cut her off and ruin the timing, “Any ideas on how to get inside a mountain god’s house?”

“I liked Ariel’s idea.” it took me a second to remember what it was Ariel had suggested, and by the time I was beginning to inform whoever said it that it was a stupid idea – I was treated to the sound of rock actively exploding away. Quickly twisting around, I saw Trinity standing in front of a massive hole that had been smashed into the rock… And she didn’t even seem winded. “…I-”

I opened my mouth to say something, but found there really was nothing. I’d let Ariel handle this one. “-Ariel?” Turning to the snarking vampire provided me with a clear view of the single most deadpan expression I have ever set eyes upon. It was like she wanted to be sarcastic, but couldn’t quite get there. “Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go!” Trinity smiled at us and held up a fist in excitement.

This is what led to us following in muted awe as Trinity quite literally punched her way through a mountain. Dirt. Rock. Minerals. Everything.

“No one is going to ask?” Ariel did not seem to be taking it well, and the silence was her answer. “Fine.” She snapped, crossing her arms and refusing to float any further, “Someone explain to me how this is happening.” We ground to a halt, the group looking towards Trinity in silent support of Ariel’s skepticism.

“It’s a technique I learned from a man who had found himself stranded in unknown lands sometime ago.” She explained, “He learned to carve his way through stone, soil and wood in order to create shelter until he could find his way back.”

“You mean to tell me some random guy taught you how to brute force your way through a mountain?” Ariel hissed disbelievingly, “No, that’s impossible. Try again.”

“You’re right!” Trinity agreed readily, “It’s more of a mental thing really – Brute force would probably cause the tunnel to cave in on us.” She crossed her arms seriously, “Besides, there’s a limit to how far sheer strength can get you. Mountains aren’t something that simply be dug through.”

“So, what you’re telling me is…. The kicking and the punching that is carving a tunnel through a mountain…”

“All in the mind, yes.” She nodded happily, “The kicking and punching isn’t even really important, you could probably get the same result by touching it.” She shrugged, turning back to the rock, “I just like working up a sweat!”  The rest of us stared on in blank befuddlement, as Ariel attempted to wrap her mind around Trinity’s existence.

I squeezed her shoulder supportingly, shaking my head as I followed behind the red haired martial arts miracle. We’d probably be at Utsuho soon, which meant we needed to keep our guard up.

——————

True to form, it wasn’t long before we did arrive at the massive chamber that housed the sleeping Utsuho. She was almost exactly as I remembered her – Lazily strewn out in a pool of lava, not a care in the world. It almost made me regret having to wake her up specifically to beat her into submission… Well, the last time she woke up she went through the same thing anyway.

The problem this time was simply… I didn’t have any kind of super power hidden up my sleeve to take her own. I could feel the connections between Ariel, Zoey and I, but it’s not like what they had been – And even if they were, I wasn’t sure how I could trigger their EX powers on cue. I didn’t think any one of us was just strong enough to take this Last Utsuho on and win…

Hell, last time it took Zoey going EX to make her flee. I don’t profess to knowing much about what EX does, but it seemed to provide an unprecedentedly powerful boost to the touhou in question… And Zoey was already a certifiable eldritch horror from beyond the veil of space, time, and human comprehension.

“Alright, here’s the plan.” We’d need to work together. This is what those weeks in Fuen were for.

———————————-

After everyone had spread out and taken their positions, it was ready to start – Best case scenario: We beat her into submission. Worst case scenario, we all died. Fen seemed concerned about that last part, but was duely ignored.

“Oh god, somebody save Fen…!”

And without further wait, I gave the signal for Miku to start the fight. “Miku!” And she took to it enthusiastically, grabbed Trinity by the hand and literally rocketing her across the lava pool. The red haired girl flipped in the air, extending her leg in a snap right as she crashed into Utsuho’s cheek.

Apparently there were two viable methods of waking up this legendary slumbering volcano deity: A meteorite and amazingly complicated machinery, or, kicking her in the face. I was something of an idiot, so I chose the latter.

Trinity had pushed off the titanic touhou as her body rose from the lava and smashed against the wall of the chamber, it was then that Ariel chose to swoop in and catch her from falling to certain death in a pool of horribly hot flaming lava. While Trinity was flown back to land, and before the Last Utsuho could fully wake up, Cecilia set to work with handfuls of knives.

At the range she was throwing them, it would have been an impossibility… If her target wasn’t legitimately as big as the room itself. It was, instead, almost impossible for her to miss her target.  Flash after flash of thin metal streaks crossed the room and embedded themselves clumsily into the massive touhou’s body, not even causing her to falter as she sleepily tried to figure out what was going on.

I doubted she even felt the tiny pin pricks.

But Cecilia worked hard even so, sweat dripping from her brow and flying off her arms as she frantically grabbed up knives and tossed them. She was beginning to panic, though. Getting sloppy – Blood was beginning to accompany that sweat as the knives slipped in her fingers and left shallow cuts along her hands with every motion…

I grit my teeth, resolving to do something for her later. Even as Utsuho turned her eyes upon the silver haired maid, and I know she was terrified by that point, she only faltered once before resuming.

“Cecilia, fall back!” I shouted, finally having enough as Utsuho began to make her way irritably across the lava pool towards her. “Miku, get in there!”

“nonononono“

Fen’s cries were overriden by Miku’s carefree smile and cheerful chirping as the teal haired girl bound forward, relieving Cecilia of her position and covering her retreat to the back lines. I had already pulled disinfectant and a super potion out in order to treat the wounds on her hands, “Good job, Cecilia.” the praise, coupled with finally being allowed to retreat from the titan, almost sent the girl into tears.

And by almost, I mean it did. Lots of them. She just broke down bawling on her knees while I applied the potion and began to wrap her fingers the best I could. “You did good, don’t worry.” My hand rested on her head comfortingly, which served to decrease the rampant crying into frantic hiccups and sniffles.

“I’m proud of you, Cecilia.” Standing up, I rubbed her head affectionately, “Now leave it to us.” Moving away from cover, I started my part of the plan while Miku started hers.

“Miku!” The teal haired girl was nothing but confidence, fearlessly dual-brandishing her traditional leak alongside the very reluctant and manically crying Fen.

“NoNoNoNo”

With a flurry of skilled strikes that would have almost fooled me into believing Miku was a famous swordsman in secret… if I wasn’t duely aware she was just rapidly flailing her arms… Fen’s panic escalated into full blown horror, and the lightning that had been coursing through her started to eject itself angrily.

It was wild and unpredictable, a localized storm of electricity that flew anywhere it felt like going as Fen discharged her anxiety into a thunder-format in every direction she was swung. It would have been useless to try and fight Utsuho with something like that at range, no matter how large the Last Utsuho was…

If said titanic Touhou hadn’t been embedded with almost a hundred metal knives acting as lightning rods.

What started as a wild and wasteful storm of electricity quickly turned into an Utsuho-Seeking thunder stream. The lightning was coiling around itself, Fen’s panic growing constantly as Utsuho grew closer, amping up the volts with every passing second.

“NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo“

It was enough to cause the Last Utsuho pain, but it was also enough to solidify the legendary touhou’s anger as she managed to stumble forward and close the distance between itself and the shore, hauling a massive gun like arm up into the air irritably.

“NONONONONO”

She was too large, even this close with the lightning constantly shocking her and paralyzing her movements, Last Utsuho was still a monstrous force to be reckoned with… And I was too far away to try and intervene now. Miku couldn’t dodge at that range, and despite my knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to save her – I tried, my mouth opening in denial even as the hand crashed down on top of her.

“NO!”

In a blinding flash of light, that single voice of rejection reverberated through the room in a thunderclap of sound so loud it was almost deafening. Almost immediately, Last Utsuho was shotgunned clean across the room like kind of railgun had just been launched point blank into her chest – A metaphor only enforced by her stomache literally being burned black and charred to a crisp.

The Last Utsuho was as confused as the rest of us at the turn of events, but I didn’t have time to figure it out now – This was it, if ever I was expecting a chance to strike when this Utsuho was weakened then it was now. Without thinking, I dashed clean off the ledge of rock and propelled myself out over the boiling pool of lava Utsuho inhabited.

Cecilia screamed, I could hear Ariel curse somewhere behind, but all that mattered now was the inky blackness. Paralyzed, confused, damaged, triggered our final trump card.

“Zoey, now!”
“Is That So~?”

—————–

The smile was in her voice, an excited bloodlust that spread out from her almost as eagerly as my own shadow unfurled and exploded out around me. In moments, my vision and sense had been swallowed by the black velvet around me and blotted both thought and sound.

It was terrifying. Like at that very moment, my existence felt like it was… inconsequential. The feeling of being so irrevokably small and insignificant in the face of something beyond human comprehension. Terror, Horror, Depression, Sadness, they clung to me viciously – Because my emotions themselves, fueled by this inhuman existence, were fading away into a comforting and warm nothingness.

Holy shit. Miku was in this for days?

Ah… Wait, a giant leek just floated by me. Bodies from… Was that Wattson? Brawly? This was way too much, I resolved that I would never ask Zoey to put me inside her again. This was a stupid idea. I wanted out now.

…No matter how disturbingly comforting and warm it felt in here.

—————-

Cecilia and the others looked on in disbelief as the shadow rose up and unfurled impossibly, a familiar figure of massacre and inhuman existence rising out of non-euclidean dimensions to mirror Last Utsuho sheer size and presence. It was darkness, shadows incarnate. A whispy and insubstantial behemoth of fearful tendrils and streams that both displayed and hid from view terrifying things which would lead lesser existences into the maw of madness itself.

It was the crawling chaos, the bloody tongue, the horror that lurked within the deepest of night – slits of countless, thousands of eyes of various sizes opening and closing across its body, moving of their own accord in their observation of everything. Their judgement of everything. From these eyes within the shadows came mouths, the grotesque sight of the pupils themselves tearing apart in the center to reveal jagged sets of fangs; mouths which smirked and gaped hungrily, excreting thick and acidic shadows like a mucus.

It was Zoey, and it had her little red ribbon attached to one of it’s tendrils.

And as the Last Utsuho laid eyes on its latest opponent, it’s body still not responding properly to its commands, its confusion at being woken up so unexpectedly reaching maximum levels, it decided that now was a good time to get the fuck out of this cave and go somewhere else. Anywhere else.

And it would have, if Zoey hadn’t descended upon the volcanic goddess and began to wrap and embrace the Last Utsuho’s frantically struggling form as her wings flared and she attempted to escape.

Ariel and the others evacuated almost as soon as Zoey had manifested, heeding Trinity’s quick reaction of herding them out of the active lava pit ASAP, which left no one but the two titans inside when Utsuho’s fear coalesced into a single orb of nuclear fury that blasted  a hole clean through the top of Mt. Kanazumi, a gaping hole large enough for her to escape through.

And so it was for the first time in ages, the volcanic goddess was exposed to the light of day once more – Mt. Kanazumi’s roiling magma flooding out from it’s mouth in celebration…. As the Last Utsuho squawked fearfully and took to the skies in terror – A massive shapeless black madness clinging on to and rising along with her. It anchored her to the ground, pulling her down just as hard as she pulled away – A miasma of predatory instinct that practically screamed ‘The End’.

One twist later, the Last Utsuho had abandoned it’s massive starry cloak in a desperate bid for freedom. Taking to the skies successfully after losing it’s clothing and disappearing into the clear blue sky at impressive speeds.

With its’ prey gone, the miasma seemed to stand viciously on it’s own, unfurling and curling upon itself in ways that defied common sense. Almost, as if deciding upon it’s course of action, or perhaps finding its next prey, the darkness that was Zoey began to recede into nothingness, slowly disappearing into thin air almost as quickly as it had come… Leaving behind an erupting volcano in it’s wake.

———————-

“Are you okay, strange human?” Zoey asked curiously, having spat me out shortly after Utsuho escaped. She hovered around me with more concern than her words gave credit for, and I found myself oddly compelled to console the girl – Reaching out towards her in askance.

Of course my legs wouldn’t move, and I couldn’t actually see, and my head hurt, and Aya thinks she may have contracted some kind of mental illness, but Navi says that’s stupid, so I didn’t really know… Anyway, I was laying against a tree and couldn’t actually reach her. Or talk to her without some kind of nonsense burbling out of my mouth in syllables that actively hurt my throat to pronounce.

Still, the little blonde girl floated down to me and peered into my face closely – Close enough that I could guide my hand to her head and pat it awkwardly. “I’m fine, you did good. Let’s never do that again.” Is what I tried to say.

“Iaia,  lhu Ft’aghn. Ph’nglui mglw’nafh, Der hastrm.” Is what came out. Along with a small glob of blood as my throat protested at the abuse. Zoey smiled all the same though… It wasn’t a bright smile, nor a particularly happy one.

It was a small, personal expression. I found myself wanting to see it more. “Zoey’s glad…” She whispered, more to herself than to me. “Zoey will go find the others, wait here.” Back to her usual carefree demeanor, the little blonde girl rose up from the ground and presumably darted off to find everyone.

Not like I could tell, though. Or move, for that matter. I think my soul was trying to reattach itself to my body.

Ow.

 

 

Episode 41: Flannery Interlude

This replay of my time with Flannery gave me a bit of confidence in an otherwise crushing series of events. I found myself enjoying Fuen’s hotsprings and the casual interaction with Flannery almost like this was a vacation…

That’s not to say nothing was getting done, however. While it was relaxing for me – The main goal was, once again, I had promised Flannery to help her get better and gain confidence. This meant that chatting and relaxing aside, most of our day was spent training with her and her touhou. Except for the first day.

The first day, Trinity had volunteered to help us and… Well we’re not entirely sure what happened after that. It was suddenly night time and she was walking away with a sweat towel.

So Trinity was left to soak in the hotsprings, which were quickly gaining far more business than it had seen in years, while we worked on our own.

“Flandre!” Flannery’s touhou were young, probably ones she had grown up with if their closeness was any indication. They were eager to please, and worked hard every day to get stronger, trying to keep Flannery’s confidence from falling. It was touching, really… To see them have a bond like that. “Are you okay?” and kind of sad when they kept being beaten into the ground.

Flannery held up the christmasy touhou gently as Miku hopped around with her Fen-sword, which she had recently learned could shoot lightning when swung around fast enough. It was a joyous occasion for her, and a mildly terrifying one for Flannery and her touhou.  The training had progressed from there as Flannery’s first, and so far only, challenge was to defeat Miku and Fen.

Goofy as she was, Miku was still something of a force of nature… Flannery and her touhou went at her again with again, stretching their limits to take her down. To Miku, it was like people were actively attempting to play with her. All day long. I’ve never seen the teal haired girl bounce around so happily.

I didn’t even really need to instruct Miku as she danced around Utsuho, Flandre and Ichirin’s frantic attempts to land hits. It was just a game of tag, and she kept smacking them in the face with an onion whenever they missed. “Utsuho, Ichirin, flank!” One thing I was glad for however was that, in a non-pressure setting, Flannery was becoming increasingly more apt to read the battle and start issuing commands to her touhou to try and better co-ordinate their fight.

The touhou in turn were becoming quicker and quicker to work together and read the situation on their own. I felt like the only thing they had truly lacked in the first place was legitimate experience battling- Their spirit was willing, but they needed to participate in fights more.

crack
smack
thud

Not that it particularly helped them against Miku and her lightning tossing Fen-sword. “Keep going! We’ve almost got it!” Flannery’s willingness to keep trying was rising, and her touhou were loath to disappoint. Against a dual wielding Miku though, it wasn’t really enough. Even the times where they did land hits on her – She would literally jump back up just as energetically and get right back to it.

Each day would end in exhaustion on both sides, which left me awake with Cecilia and Ariel during the nights. Ariel had been absent for most of what had occurred since I left home, so I took this time to fill her in on the events up until now – As well as our current plans for the future. Telling her we were in Fuen not to get the badge but to wake up and take on the sleeping Volcanic Deity housed under Mt. Kanazumi went over well.

“YOU’RE DOING WHAT?!”

And introducing her to Zoey didn’t go as badly as I thought it would either.

“You befriended an eldritch abomination that massacres entires continents and let it live in your shadow? ARE YOU INSANE!?”

They got along well after Ariel was assured that the horrible dark shadowy mass which had eaten Muro and Kinsetsu was not on a hair-trigger unless something flashed her. It took a little calming down, and it helped that Ariel could sort of see through the dark orb that had perpetually stayed around her.

It wasn’t even there for me. Hadn’t been there for a while now… I had almost forgotten that everyone else only saw Zoey as a floating eldritch shadow.

The weeks we spent in Fuen were both a relieving break from our non-stop journey so far, and some of the most stressful ones as we prepared to go take on the Legendary Utsuho beneath Kanazumi. I wasn’t about to go in there if Ariel and Cecilia were going to break down in the middle of combat to fight each other, which meant they needed to find a truce.

That, in turn, equated to me spending the nights with both of them. We would fight. We would train. We would occasionally be at each other’s throats… Trinity helped diminish the last problem by staying on stand-by to step in.

The training served several purposes – I was becoming stronger again, since Ariel had rejoined us. I needed to know my limits, to know what I was capable of now. It shocked Ariel, and Cecilia was still attempting to understand and cope with the fact that I was perfectly capable of protecting myself to an extent.

Ariel needed to be brought up to speed with the rest of my team though. She was naturally strong, an elegant and powerful force to be reckoned with, but she simply hadn’t been forced to go through the challenges and events everyone else had. Like Flannery’s touhou, there was a clear division between holding raw power and talent, and having experienced fights constantly.

Of course, Cecilia hadn’t actually fought in… Ever. She was determined, much like Flannery’s touhou were, and seemed to have the aptitude for creating ice. Trinity had suggested she learn to use small projectiles to stay out of the way of direct combat until she got more accustomed to fighting, which led up to the red haired martial artist taking her aside from time to time to teach her basic knife handling and throwing.

This meant that aside from Cecilia, my experience combined with super-human capabilities set me roughly on par with Ariel until she built up experience of her own. It was convenient… For a short period of time. Even in just the few weeks we had, I could see and feel Ariel surpassing me with just paltry sparring experience.

It was humbling, how amazing Touhou really were.

The training served to forge a connection between Cecilia and Ariel as well. It wasn’t friendship or comradery, but they were… Well, more apt to not leave the other to die. Cecilia was still hostile towards Ariel though – In a more domestic, subtle manner. Ariel returned the sentiment in a blunt and public way that left no mistakes of how they viewed each other.

But that was fine. Their hate was fueled by something I couldn’t necessarily grasp, but I didn’t expect them to magically resolve it and become buddies.  All I needed was for it to not make them a danger to each other when fighting.

“Ah!” My attention drifted back to Flannery and miku’s training as her touhou had managed to disarm Miku’s Fen-sword, an unprecedented success that spurned them on to pressing the attack on the surprised teal haired girl while she watched Fen go twirling up into the air dizzily. Poor girl had been swung around for hours. daily. for weeks. “Don’t get overconfident!” Flannery’s voice cut in, “Utsuho, them at range! Flandre, Ichirin, go!”

The two touhou dashed in as Utsuho’s fireball flew over their back, the larger cloud touhou moving to become a tank for Flandre while they closed in to flank. Miku was caught off guard, a frightened ‘Miku!’ squeaking out of her throat as they bared down on her…

“BOW TO FEN!”

…Except, this being the first time they had actually managed to disarm Miku, they had forgotten the fight was against Miku and Fen. The Fen who was recently gaining tastes of power, and a confidence stemming from her travels with Ariel, which led to her being more and more willing to try and help Miku and the others in fights.

One of the things she had learned was that most things didn’t look up.

The other thing she learned was what happened when you struck different things with lightning! That is to say, the same thing. They got ‘pzzzt‘ and twitch. Miku thought it was funny. Fen liked Miku smiling.

She had quickly become a shock-happy fairy.

“Utsuho, no!” And in short order, the supporting fire was replaced by Miku laying on the ground twitching while Fen chased Flandre around from the sky shooting little arcs of electricity at her.

Perhaps instinctively, Fen tended to prioritize things with wings.

This left Ichirin quite suddenly facing a very happy Miku alone – A task I wasn’t sure anything was capable of doing. In short order, the cloud touhou was sent flying through the air directly at Fen in attempt to ‘make more shockies’. Fen never had a chance, but her gut reaction when startled now was to just shock everything.

So ichirin became the desired ‘more shockies’ and Miku was pleased.

“Augh!” and they landed on Utsuho, who got shocked more.

“… I think that’s enough for today.” I called, Flannery baffled at how the fight had turned around just like that. “Flan, don’t forget to keep an eye who everyone you’re fighting. If someone gets out of sight, bad things happen.” She nodded almost absently, walking towards her pile of touhou to help them up as I tried to get Miku to calm down and extract Fen.

Miku, aside from enjoying seeing things get shocked and twitch, also seemed to have developed a liking for getting shocked herself – Often sneaking up on Fen specifically to scare her and get shocked. Or sticking her onion in electrical sockets. Or convincing Fen to shock her.

She only did that last thing once. Fen cried.

It may have just been my paranoia, but I think she was starting to develop a resistance to electricity… Continued exposure to Fen’s shocks probably wasn’t going to lead to anything healthy.

“Alright, let’s hit the hotsprings, Flan. Everyone deserves a break today, I think.”

—————

The hotspring was a great idea. Until Trinity joined us. I’m not really sure what happened after that, we all came to later when Miku jumped in abruptly behind Fen. We had a split second of conscious thought and awareness return to us… It was enough to have horror creep up on us before the inevitable occurred.

“Save Fen!” The little fairies pitiful cries and wide red eyes were lost under a quickly transmitted pool of electricity that left everyone but Miku laying sprawled across the hotsprings.

“Miku!”

———————

Those weeks came to an end sooner than I would have liked. Word of Kalkun in the area reminded me that I was here for a reason – One that couldn’t be put off any longer.

Flannery and I exchanged phone numbers as I left Fuen. It was silly to tell her I was going to go beat a volcanic sleeping god into submission – So I didn’t. “I’m heading to Mt. Kanazumi to check out these kalkun sightings,” I had explained to her, an uncertain look crossing her face, “Don’t worry – If I find anything too dangerous, I’ll come back.” reassuring Flannery took some effort.

I conveniently left out the fact that I didn’t consider the sleeping volcano deity to be ‘too dangerous’.

“Take care of yourself, Flannery. Call me if you need me, I’ll come help.”

And we left – It was time to go take care of Utsuho.

 

Episode 40: Dysfunctional Implies It’s Still Functional Somehow.

It was almost an hour later that the suddenly expanded group had finally settled down back at what passed for camp. Miku and Zoey were as carefree as usual, finding all the excitement to be nothing less than great. Fen had made a dart straight for Miku the first chance she had gotten – And the two of them were off in their own little world as they tried to get Trinity to play with them.

Zoey, having wandered off into the night after she realized nothing else of interest was going to happen, was probably out keeping an eye on the things that might be around the area.

Which left me setting at the fire with a mildly hostile Ariel across from me, and an overtly protective Cecilia tightly at my side. I would have felt less uncomfortable if I was being paid attention to even remotely, but this… It was like they were sizing each other up.

“Well…” Finally I broke the silence between them, noting Cecilia clutching my sleeve as Ariel’s eyes flashed to mine. “Let’s start from the beginning.” I leaned forward, wincing slightly as the claw marks on my back complained at the motion. “How did you find me…? And when did you pick up Fen?” My questions would go unanswered as her response was an almost immediate retort. “You want the beginning? Let’s start with why you thought it would be a good idea to just abandon me without a word.”

She crossed her arms as I felt, rather than heard, Cecilia tense beside me. “And on the note of abrupt abandonments, how about you tell me why you just left a brat like Fen alone in the woods?” Ariel’s words cut like her nails and left us staring at each other for several seconds in silence while I tried to think of an appropriate answer.

I opened my mouth to reply finally, only to be cut off by Cecilia’s terse voice. “Why don’t we start with who you are, to speak to my mistress so cagily!” If hostility could be channeled into some kind of physically harming assault – She would have managed it right then and there. Unfortunately, this only seemed to flame the smoldering ashes of Ariel’s rage as she exploded back with blood rushing furiously to her face. “Who am I? Who are you!? This loser has been my property before you even entered the picture!”

“Loser!” Cecilia seemed to take the insult more personally than I did. “Mistress is nobody’s property!”

“You want to make something of it, wench!?” And this was the point where I realized I was in a terrible position for what was coming next. It was also, I had the briefest moment of absolute clarity, the point I realized I was not fast enough to escape what was coming next.

Shit.

Or rather, those were my thoughts had Cecilia not shoved me backwards off the log as she dove across the fire and tackled Ariel in mid flight in a flash of silver. By the time I had righted myself, I was treated to the spectacular view of Ariel suspending the two of them in the air, a knife’s blade clenched firmly between her fangs as Cecilia locked onto the blonde vampire’s wrists to avoid her claws. The light of the fire reflected off the metal in almost molten sheen that served only to highlight Ariel’s almost feral expression.

Their scuffle was cut short by the sudden appearance of Trinity – And by sudden I don’t mean she exploded from the bush; I didn’t even blink and I still wasn’t sure when she had gotten from wherever she had been to where she was now holding the two of them apart by the neck of their shirts. “…ah?” My jaw unhinged itself in disbelief while I tried to wrap my mind around this woman’s very existence.

Again.

“No hate between friends.” She intoned solemnly to the two furious – yet thoroughly shocked – girls being held apart in her clenched fists.

“Like hell that wench is my frie-!”
“She insulted my Mistre-!”

A resounding crack echoed around the campfire in the wake of Trinity slamming their heads together swiftly, a frown on her face as her green eyes bore into their own golden and crimson ones.

“No hate.”

From my position on the ground, I could only look up at the amazonian goddess before me, her frame frighteningly framed by the firelight, holding two touhou immobile almost nonchalantly.  ‘She’s like Violence Buddha…‘ a traitorous thought snuck into my forethought and shook me from my stupor.

“Alright… Let’s start over.” I sighed tiredly, feeling the weight of the night on my shoulders, “Ariel, this is Cecilia. Due to circumstances… She’s my maid.” I bowed my head lightly, “Please don’t attack her.”

“Cecilia,” I turned to the silver haired girl, a knife still clutched- Wait, when had Trinity disarmed…? Oh fuck it. “This is Ariel, she’s my first Touhou.” in more ways than one… “And… she’s telling the truth. I abandoned her.”

Silence around the fireplace, Fen popping up from behind Trinity’s shoulder with a sad smile on her face. “Fen too…” she muttered quietly, and my head hung lower. Someone just kill me now.

“Yeah,” I sighed heavily, “I abandoned Fen too.”

“It’s good you’re addressing your commitment issues like this!” Trinity chirped encouragingly in the midst of an otherwise depressing atmosphere.

———————————-

It was a long and tiring explanation of events from both sides that followed – One that went deep into the night and nearly caused several more fights. By the end however, we had all aired our feelings and resolved to become good friends and united against a common goa-

Yeah, I can’t do this.
Those are all lies.

By the end of the night, nothing was resolved, and I felt worse than when I started. The feeling of tension between Ariel and Cecilia and I was almost palpable now – Even Miku could read the scene. Trinity had decided we were an interesting group and was going to follow us around for a while, Fen and Miku seemed more or less happily reunited, and Zoey came out of the entire event the same as she went in.

For better or worse though,  I had been reunited with Ariel, and unexpectedly, Fen.  It seemed the two of us were stuck together. Speaking of which…

“Ariel?”
“…”

The others had fallen into a fitful sleep by the fire some time ago, but sleep was something I couldn’t do right now.  Still, I wasn’t alone this late – The soft sound of Ariel letting herself hover down was all the acknowledgement I could expect to get for now. The two of us stood out in the open now, under the starry skies in fresh air… It almost felt nostalgic.

“So…” She ventured quietly, her passion worn and burnt away.
“… I’m sorry.” It was barely a whisper in my own voice, but it felt like the words had tried to haul my organs out through my throat when they left. I pressed on though, if I faltered now then I would never have the nerve to finish it. “It’s hollow and cliche, but I honestly thought I was doing the right thing. I didn’t want to drag you into this again, barge my way into your life and sidetrack it for my own selfish reasons.”

A weaker person would try to hurt themselves to atone for this. Suicide was probably an option too. A weaker person was not me. A weaker person would not grind in their heels and snarl in the face of a god, swearing revenge. A weaker person would not do the things I have done in the name of a personal grievance. A weaker person…

A weaker person would have run away.
Like I did.
From everything.

“I convinced myself…. That this was the best course of action. That Ophelia had to pay for what she had done.” My tone was growing hollow as I continued, a morbidly depressing feeling of resolution slipping into it as if my flesh and bone had been clawed away to reveal the resolve I had built myself around since the beginning. “And that’s all I had. You weren’t the same. Things changed. Roxanne didn’t know me. Flannery hasn’t even met me yet. I have a sister now, Ariel. I don’t even know who I was supposed to be here.”

A shudder passed through my body that had nothing to do with the night chill, and everything to do with the ominous creaking in my body that indicated a cracking of that resolve. A crack that was spreading astronomically fast – One that couldn’t be undone now.

“And… And I missed you!” and I bawled openly, “I’m confused, and I don’t know whats going on and everyone’s gone and I missed you so much…!”

It was a long night. I aired all of my feelings and realized I had no resolve and was very scared and very alone with people who looked like my friends, people who sounded like my friends, but ultimately weren’t the same.

And I had spent so much time deluding myself into thinking they were, that I didn’t even know who they were now. “And they’re following me anyway, and I don’t even know why!” I was breaking down, plain and simple. I had probably done this before. It was happening again. “And I keep trying, Ariel. Choosing a path. No regrets. Just keep going. I’m trying, Ariel…!” God I had tried. I kept fooling myself into believing I had done it, too.

“But I have all of these regrets, I don’t even know how to move forward anymore without running away. All I could do was blame Ophelia and hunt her down, if I could just force her to send me back… To fix everything… I hate her!” the crux of the matter, “I hate her so much, I can’t even imagine not hating her. I threw everything I was into that hate, Ariel! It kept me strong! It kept my going!” It distracted me. Something left unsaid, but my mind whispered it all the same.

And what it all came down to now, after all of this time of hating, and running, and soldiering on with the best and the most selfish intents in mind… “And I’m too tired to hate, now.” I dropped to my knees, the sheer weight hauling me to the ground and crushing me. “I’m too tired to keep doing this. I just want to stop….”

Leathery wings covered me from behind, a warm body pressing against mine with a heavy sigh by my ear. “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about it.” the blonde vampire whispered, “I want to say you’re a nutcase. Sometimes I wanted to just forget you ever showed up that day.” Her arms tightened around me, “You’re a coward who ran away, and it disgusts me… And I’m a fool for following you… But there’s something inside me that won’t let you go.”

It was a long night. She aired all her feelings and I don’t know if she found or lost anything like I had, but she continued on as stubbornly as the touhou I remembered.

“And I don’t know if you’re crazy, or what you’re talking about, but when you left I was furious… I’m still furious. It wasn’t just an insult, it felt wrong. Like someone who should have always been there had suddenly left, and I was alone. I had been by myself for years, but for the first time I honestly felt alone. ” Left unspoken was that she’d go through hell before she let it happen again.  “I don’t know who you are, or what the hell is wrong with you, but you’re mine.” She hissed, “And that’s all I can feel from you.”

It was a long night. By the end of it, we had  aired all of our feelings and felt better for it. We resolved to try and make amends, to move forward in our lives and discover for ourselves what was to come.

…No, that was a lie.

We yelled.
We cried.
We held each other.

And come morning, things had changed. Somehow. But I don’t know if it was for better or worse, and I probably wouldn’t know – Not for a long time.

What I did know was that I had more Touhou in my party now, and it was time for me to find Flannery. I still needed to take down Utsuho, that hadn’t changed in the least… But after last night, it was harder to reach for my hate to keep me on a straight path. Blaming Ophelia was beginning to feel hollow, but it was all I knew how to do now.

By the time I found her, I hoped my feelings would have resolved themselves – Even if punishing her wasn’t what I really wanted… Closure was. I needed to meet her again. For that, I needed strength – And There was no better way of gaining that then going after Utsuho.

With these thoughts in mind, we entered the Fuen city gym as one of the strangest entourages the town had ever seen.

—————————-

“Was kicking the door open really necessary?” I found myself again trying to wrap my mind around Trinity’s existence as she stood with one glorious, toned leg extended out through where the door used to be – Having recently been blown open by a red haired amazonian goddess. “Yes.” she set her leg down and waltzed into the gym liked she owned the damn thing, “Entrances are important!” She turned and gave me a thumbs up with a massive grin on her face – “Everyone needs to know you’ve arrived.”

I once again attempted to wrap my mind around Trinity’s very existence. “Right, well help me get up on that stage.” I pointed towards the little ledge between the entrance and the gym stage. All I really had to do was wait here until Flannery got here, anyway.

——————

Almost two hours later, the door separating the maze from the gym stage opened quietly, a tired and worn out looking girl with red hair, wearing jeans and T-shirt stumbled in. I watched her sigh deeply as she shut the door behind her and sliding down to the floor with her back against the now closed door.

“Third time I got lost in that maze this week…” I heard her mutter half heartedly to herself, “I bet grandpa never got lost in his own maze.” A sharp exhale was all the laugh she got out of herself for that comment.

“Yo.” I waved lazily from the Gym leader’s chair, making the girl’s head snap up with wide eyes. “You the gym leader?” I asked rhetorically, shifting to stand up and dusting off my pants in the process. “Y-Yes!” She scrambled to her feet in a matter of moments, quickly going for her snowglobes as she attempted to adopt a more professional attitude. “I am Flanner- I mean, I am the leader of this Gym since my grandpa…. I ‘m the Gym leader now!”

I cocked an eyebrow. was she this bad before? “Right.” I acknowledged, “I was starting to wonder if maybe the Gym was closed today.”

“No!” Flannery blurted out rapidly, “No, I’m op- We, I mean we’re open! Taking challenges!” I fought the urge to sigh – No, no I didn’t. I sighed.  “I’m ready when you are.”

Deciding how I was going to do this was… touchy. Zoey was more like a tactical nuke than a touhou, so I couldn’t hope to use her in this fight… To say nothing of her scarring Flannery for life. Miku was a definite option, and probably my only real one… But she was unpredictable. Especially regarding people she knew before ophelia had messed with reality. So that left who?

Cecilia and Ariel were… In a delicate situation. Neither of them were on good terms with one another, and they both wanted to take the opportunity to prove their worth in combat. For various reasons, depending on who you asked – Cecilia was out for assuring me she was worth while. Ariel was out to prove she was strong. Regardless of their reasons though, using one meant the other would be upset.

Which left me with… Trinity. She wasn’t even technically my touhou, she just decided to follow us around because we were ‘interesting’. Not that she minded – She was always up for a good fight.

“Alright, let the battle begin!” Flannery announced the start as she threw out her touhou – A blonde haired girl with a white hat. She seemed ready to fight – So with preemptive initiative on her side, the smaller touhou launched herself at Trinity an-

crack

Flandre’s limp body was thoroughly embedded in the wall behind Flannery, who very slowly turned to look at her touhou… Who had somehow been launched from mid-air to behind her in less time than it took her to blink. Turning back, Trinity had a single, long, gloriously toned leg and godlookatherbodywhatkindofgoddess–

With supreme force of will power, Flannery managed to not oggle Trinity as said touhou set her back on the ground and picked her hands up in a martial arts stance. “O-Okay, lucky shot!” She shifted to the side, this time sending out Mokou to deal with-

thud

Mokou’s face was planted in the ground before she even had a chance to do anything, Trinity’s mind numbingly amazing body uncoiling from her downward strike like some kind of beautiful train wreck of pure might.

“Ah…?” flannery stumbled back, fumbling for her final snowglobe as she released a strange blue clothed touhou with a cloud of steam around them. They had some kind of food in their hand, and I wasn’t entirely sure what it was supposed to be, but… “Ichirin, go!”

The girl launched herself at Trinity with ferocious speed, the steam around her coalescing into a solid fist that planted itself firmly into Trinity’s solar plexus with enough force make the concussion audible to the rest of the room!

“Hey, not bad!” Trinity smiled at the cloud girl, whose face abruptly changed from joy to shock, and then slowly to wariness as she tried to back away. Except backing away wasn’t an option, as she had been grabbed up by her shirt and lifted clean into the air in a single smooth motion. “My turn!” and then made a complete arc overtop of Trinity before being driven head first into the ground so hard she actually went through the small stage a little.

Trinity munched on the burger she had… at some point disarmed from the cloud girl.

“A…Ah….Awwwww…..” And flannery collapsed to the ground like I remembered. “I knew I wasn’t ready for this!” I felt kind of bad that this had happened… But it was more or less the way it happened last time too.

And so, some events played out the same… Even when so many other things changed.

I felt good about this. Maybe it was just because, as of now, I had everyone I missed back with me. Sort of.

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Touhou obtained: None!
Badges obtained: 1
Emotional Progress: made.

No quotes.