As long as one Spirit was successfully captured, the cost of this operation—however great—would be worth it.
That was how DEM's upper echelons had reasoned it. And there was no real need for Westcott to come down himself.
But no one had anticipated this: the plan to lure Origami into tricking Shiori out alone by dangling the First Spirit as bait—had resulted in the First Spirit actually showing up.
"Heh heh heh..." Westcott pressed a hand over the lower half of his face, unable to suppress his amusement.
"I knew I wasn't wrong about this face. The girl who manipulates Spirit power at will—I'd been wondering who you were. It's you, isn't it, Takamiya."
"Takamiya..." Shiori could only stare blankly. She had no memories of being Shinji Takamiya.
In truth, even counting her past life as Shinji Takamiya, she and Westcott had never been acquainted. The real reason was simple: it was Westcott who had put a bullet through Shinji Takamiya.
He tilted his head back, gazing at the lethal pollen drifting through the sky, and murmured with something almost like rapture: "Beautiful."
"Sandalphon, Gabriel, Raphael!" Three Angels summoned at once—something Shiori had never attempted before, because pushing too much spiritual power in one go always left her dizzy afterward.
The greatsword's swing carved a shockwave that should have cut through steel—but it was stopped just short of Westcott by multiple overlapping Territories. As DEM's true authority, he hadn't come without bodyguards; and even setting them aside, he was himself a magician without peer in the world, though he had never been in the habit of using a CR-Unit.
"Tch." Shiori scanned her surroundings. All of Westcott's bodyguards were running identical unit models—mass-production types, probably.
Though given who he was, he wasn't the sort of person to use cheap cannon fodder.
If it were one-on-one or two-on-one, Shiori had some confidence. But this many people fighting in coordination was beyond a girl with zero real combat experience. At least, she was starting to feel intimidated.
She didn't hesitate. Using Raphael—the 8th Sephira's Angel—in its wing form, she broke away fast, trying to shake them off.
"Running again? Well. At least this time you're not dragging someone else (Mio Takamiya) along the ground." Westcott waved a hand. The bodyguards moved in pursuit without holding back.
"Zadkiel!"
Yoshino's Angel condensed a frost shield against the barrage of beams; she swung Sandalphon hard at the nearest bodyguard—no technique to it, raw strength alone, enough to overwhelm the woman outright. But those few simple actions already had Shiori's breath coming short.
"This won't work..."
She broke away again, using the altitude to watch Westcott's expression from a distance—that inhuman, placid smile.
As much as she hated to admit it, if she actually tried to fight them, she might collapse from exhaustion before they ever took her down. If she could make it back alive today, she had to train properly.
Shiori dismissed all her Angels except for Raphael's wing form, narrowing her focus entirely to flying and evasion.
Crack.
At that moment, Ein Sof—held together by a thread—finally gave out. Golden cracks ran outward from its base along the ground, spreading kilometers in an instant. One luminous thread, whether by intention or coincidence, passed directly through Shiori's body.
For a moment she thought she was about to be sliced in half. But in that instant there was warmth—there and gone, like the happiness of being bathed in Yimi's light.
She had no time to process what had happened. One of the bodyguards was already bringing a sword down at her. Even blocking with Sandalphon, Shiori was still sent flying, slamming hard into the rolling shutter of a factory somewhere nearby.
It hurt like hell. An ordinary person would have gone straight to the ICU.
But this place—didn't it feel a little familiar?
She lay on her back and looked up. Something she recognized.
Right—this was the street they always used for dates. She'd flown that far... And this warehouse was one of Ratatoskr's storage spots, stocked with supplies so they could set up a festival stall anywhere at a moment's notice.
And beyond that...
"This thing is still in here?!"
She genuinely could not understand why something this dangerous hadn't been temporarily locked away on Fraxinus for safekeeping. Then again—was this a coincidence?
Shiori thought back to the golden crack that had just passed through her.
Maybe luck was pointing her somewhere.
Though she had no idea whether this had stolen someone else's luck.
Westcott gazed at Ein Sof's fracturing barrier with quiet contemplation. Things seemed to be unfolding differently from what he'd imagined.
"Bzzzt—bzzzt—bzzzt—"
A bizarre noise, growing closer, cut through his thoughts. When the source finally came into view, there was a moment where Westcott genuinely wondered if he was hallucinating.
"AAAAH!!"
Itsuka Shiori—a high school girl—was hurtling toward him astride a wiggle car, a child's toy wildly ill-suited to her body, at a speed no child's toy had any business reaching. One hand held a frost shield conjured from Zadkiel, braced against incoming fire. Her voice was not a war cry. It was simply screaming.
To be fair to Ratatoskr, they had done their due diligence—they'd studied the thing and concluded it was neither a CR-Unit nor a Spirit-made weapon. Unable to classify it, they had boxed it up as a little girl's beloved toy, waiting for the next time they could arrange a date with the child and return it to her.
Shiori had no idea Ratatoskr had done any of this. She only remembered that this thing had killed before.
As it turned out, she'd gambled right. Not a drop of spiritual power needed: responding to her will alone, the wiggle car shot forward with the momentum of a race vehicle, even tilting sideways up a wall mid-turn.
By the time she realized she couldn't control the speed, it was too late. She hadn't thought to hold it back when she grabbed the wheel, and now, with inertia this powerful, slamming the brakes felt dangerous in itself.
Even as light as it had been to carry, driving it felt like commanding a dump truck—the kind where you can't afford to stomp the brakes and fight the momentum at the same time.
—
[Wiggle Car]: A child's toy. Lets you traverse rough terrain at full speed, though it produces an incessant buzzing sound. Capable of delivering the impact force of a dump truck.
—
Westcott's lip curved upward. He raised one hand to work a spell. "If DEM ever holds a team-building retreat, I suppose we could hire you for a comedy act. As for right now—"
He noticed something was wrong. The wiggle car was somehow getting faster.
WHAM.
The wiggle car hit him in the shin.
Westcott collapsed into a full Yamcha pose in a hole that seemed custom-made for him.
Ein Sof collapsed. Had Ratatoskr still had capacity to observe, they might have noticed approximately seven kilometers of Tenguu City simply vanishing.
In a form entirely unlike anything Mio had anticipated—because she could not comprehend what kind of power had done this.
"How could this... Who are you, exactly?"
In that final moment, Mio seemed to perceive something. A different presence—not Yimi—had looked at her through the layer of light, then looked again at the small cat at the center.
It was nothing like her own kind. Not a First Spirit.
The Six-Winged Ring that had hung behind Mio fell along with her. The Angel of Nothingness deactivated—or not entirely.
For reasons she could not explain, the Angel meant to erase all things it encountered should have returned to Mio herself. All three of her Angels were torn apart instead.
Mio closed her eyes serenely, facing the end without the terror she had braced for.
Perhaps she had finally begun to understand. Even after everything she had done, her little Shinji might never come back. So if she could depart alongside them—that, in its own way, felt like a gift.
But why was she still not dead?
Because when divinity scattered across the earth, the power of choice passed entirely into the small cat's hands. And in that moment, Yimi finally felt what the Holy Corpse had granted her—a power one might call miracle, too numerous and vast to count, beyond her small vocabulary to describe. Yet somehow she could see clearly: what the woman before her wanted, what she was at her core, what she was about to do.
The world's impurity. It must all be weighed and judged.
Yimi grabbed her head and shook it hard. The sensation was deeply wrong—it was even trying to force her emotions into stillness, to subsume her into its calm.
Wrapped in pure white light, the unclothed cat stepped across invisible ground toward the First Spirit, each step sounding like the toll of a judgment bell.
"Haah..." A familiar sigh beside her ear. "Pick it up."
"Old man?" Yimi looked back. No spectral saint in sight.
One moment of clarity—and the cat, back in herself, ran and retrieved the Spear of Longinus. The divine influence settled back into quiet.
Yimi looked to System's display.
Main Quest: Defeat the First Spirit — COMPLETED
Weakling Shiori had been lying. The cat was already plenty strong.
Yimi turned, leveling the spear at Mio. "I want to ask you—"
"You..."
That was the last sound she heard from Mio.
The final shard of Ein Sof fell. Something separated the two of them, and what lay before Yimi was a different darkness entirely.
She had not returned to the real world. Something about sheer force had gone wrong.
The true Neighboring World. That was where she was.
"Mrow?" Where even was this.