Against DEM's fleet assault, Ratatoskr should not have been at a disadvantage. That was how it was supposed to go.
But Mio Takamiya, the First Spirit, had deliberately destroyed nearly half of Fraxinus's systems from the inside to conceal the sudden disappearance of her half-self, Reine. The result: key personnel found themselves trapped in rooms whose automatic doors had naturally failed to open when the power cut out. This served as a reminder that automatic systems were always more dangerous than manual ones.
"What in the world is happening?! Where did Shiori go?!"
"Commander, it's those particles." Minowa Kozue, substituting at Reine's post, analyzed the situation.
From the feed of Tengu City below, a blue rose was silently blooming—not the kind of shape that belonged to the human world, all clean angles and geometry. The pollen drifting from it dispersed across the entire city. Everything it touched—living or mechanical—entered a state of instantaneous shutdown.
Ain Soph Aur: the First Spirit's First Angel. Its effect was the forced elimination of an object's lifespan—or perhaps more precisely, its expiration date. Living things died. Inanimate things ceased. Simple, absolute, utterly without negotiation.
"Is that white light Yimi? And the one she's facing—is that Phantom?"
The Phantom who had distributed Spirit power to the Spirits; Yimi, who had shown hostility toward the First Spirit seemingly from the moment they met. The thread connecting these facts couldn't have been more obvious.
"Phantom is the First Spirit?"
"Commander, DEM's fleet has been detected! They haven't been damaged at all!"
"Tch—" Kotori crunched her lollipop clean through. "The First Spirit and DEM are working together, is that it? Just what we needed. How much of Fraxinus can we still use?"
"Report: only locomotion and Territory remain operational. Gungnir has also been damaged—"
Gungnir was Fraxinus's most powerful weapon: a light cannon deployed in conjunction with Kotori's Astral Dress.
"So it really doesn't work on you." The First Spirit, Mio Takamiya, regarded Yimi with genuine curiosity, her expression and voice as soft and unchanging as ever. "I wonder where you're from."
Yimi floated before her, not dodging, not bracing. She even reached out and let the pollen from Ain Soph Aur settle onto her open palm.
Mio tilted her chin, thinking. "Somehow… ever since you first fell, you've had a quality that reminds me of myself. Are you a second Spirit of Origin, created by them? But there's no magical energy or Spirit power in you at all…"
"Are you Grandma?" The little cat's eyes held no real battle intent.
She loved Grandma. And by extension, she'd grown fond of Fake-Grandma too.
Fake-Grandma wasn't as good as Real Grandma, but she'd still fed Kitty and been gentle with her. Kitty could not raise a hand against someone who fed her.
But Love Train showed Yimi what lay at the end of every deflected path. Without that force, she would have been gutted open just moments ago.
"Where does your hostility toward me come from?" Mio touched her cheek, genuinely puzzled. "You don't seem to be with DEM either. Have you found something out?"
Thirty years earlier, after being created by DEM's four founders, Mio had not waited passively to be controlled. She ran.
A girl who was nearly a blank slate—not much more than a person-shaped void—had the fortune to be found by a kind young woman named Shinji Takamiya. One could say, in a way, that she was Itsuka Shiori's previous life.
In short: she was taken in by the Takamiya sisters. Given clothes. Given good food. Shown every beautiful thing this world had to offer.
A genuinely happy time. It continued—until they had become the most important people in each other's lives, until a confession had been made—and that was the exact day DEM caught up with them.
Shinji Takamiya, an ordinary human, was shot dead right in front of her. Mio tried to save her. The power that had been called divine couldn't resurrect the dead.
Mio shattered Shinji's remains and condensed them within herself as a fetus. That was where Itsuka Shiori came from. It was also the reason Shiori could seal Spirits.
As for Mio's second goal—she wanted the newly reborn "little Shiori" to no longer be so fragile. She wanted to give her power. But fragile Shiori, even reborn from Mio's own body, lacked the constitution to hold that kind of force. So Mio divided a small portion of her own power into ten fragments and bestowed them upon ten other young women.
Of course, power that even Shiori couldn't withstand was beyond any ordinary person too. Each Sephira Crystal required countless human lives to purify it into something a person could accept.
Once Shiori had absorbed all ten fragments of Spirit power, Mio would retrieve the distributed crystals and erase everything that made Shiori who she was—every memory—returning her to Shinji Takamiya. The ten Spirits would die the moment it happened.
Yimi had been an unexpected variable from the start. A sudden appearance; an uncanny resemblance to Mio herself; a dangerous unknown. Mio had tried to manage her through the First Sephira Crystal—hiding inside it—but the plan had backfired spectacularly. The owner of that power had turned the trap around.
Now Mio stared at the ring floating behind her, ten spheres set along its arc. Only a single sphere was lit—a faint white glow—and it hadn't even been absorbed by Shiori before being retrieved. Worse, the one person who knew her true identity was frustratingly, stubbornly alive.
If she let Yimi reach Shiori ahead of schedule and reveal everything, this would become very complicated.
Mio manifested her Second Angel.
"Ein Sof."
The ground appeared beneath Yimi's feet. The space around them transformed: a chessboard of interlocking black and white, every other direction swallowed by darkness, a great luminous tree blazing in pure white at its far end.
A Wizard's Territory drew its effects from the user's will—a technique created in direct imitation of this. The effect: the entire area for several kilometers was converted into a Neighboring World, every rule within it dictated solely by Mio Takamiya.
"Let me think… I'll start by disabling the 'redirected misfortune' ability."
The light surrounding Yimi flickered for a single instant. Something had changed.
"You're not a good person."
Whatever warmth had carried over from Fake-Grandma's kindness—in this moment, the little cat saw things clearly.
She reversed her grip on the scarlet lance. In the white radiance, an unusual light played across the metal.
"That is…?"
Mio's eyelids narrowed slightly. She had noticed this object from the beginning. It reflected no visible luster, and yet there had always been some nameless instinct driving her to look away from it.
With the motion of a throwing child, the weapon stained with the blood of God's Son traced what felt, within Ein Sof, like a red line through the air—cutting clean through the white silk Mio raised to block it, crossing the distance between them in an instant.
In that instant, Mio Takamiya felt, genuinely and without performance, the threat of death.
What is this?
A little cat who had only just converted from full-cat to full-human form, still adjusting to the new control scheme, could not possibly land a perfect first throw. The bloodstained edge grazed past Mio's shoulder—not through it—carving a small but bone-deep wound before pinning itself into the edge of Ein Sof.
Mio pressed a hand to her shoulder, her expression unchanged from its gentle serenity as blood flowed freely.
"Is this your 'Angel'?" she asked. "There's a feeling of being targeted—as though you were crafted specifically to counter me. Like a weapon made to fight me. Did DEM create you?"
She tried to heal the wound. Not a complete failure—it did close, slowly. But slowly like ordinary human regeneration.
No more stalling. All the light in the world seemed to concentrate in this single point. The First Spirit deployed her most powerful, nameless Angel.
"Our time together was enjoyable, though…"
「 」
Unconditional erasure of everything—an Angel so absolute that even its name was a blank page, the most unreasonable force in existence. Even the Neighboring World Mio herself had created seemed to tremble in response.
Not shimmer. Tremble.
"『Famine!』"
With the Spear of Longinus no longer in her hands to suppress her, Yimi's full divinity blazed free—golden cracks tearing open the earth.