Koneko Rescue Arc 2: Grief and Grace
A wall of blades, stretching above the height of the trees and curving forward to form half a dome, coalesced into being by the thousand and froze the air around them, creating a scent that was not quite scent but more of its absence, and yet was sensible nonetheless. Exactingly identical, constructed of ice as nothing more than a piercing point with twinned cutting edge, they hung in space as if suspended from invisible wires – and then they flew, each leaving behind the distinctive blast of a sonic boom.
'Take the young man and retreat a distance please, Ms Toujou. It wouldn't do for either of you to be in the way right now.'
Flames the golden-yellow of a high Summer sun, spreading like water across the floor of the clearing as they cast a blinding light, erupted from thin air to eat at the world and leave behind the scent of burning sandalwood. Ever-changing, never still for a moment, they moved forwards from the moment they came to be as an infinitely complex sea of flaming tongues – and as they moved, they roared.
That was the last thing Grayfia said.
The two attacks were unalike in every way, diametric opposites save for the one synonymous trait they shared.
But really…
Each one of them was powerful almost beyond belief.
What counts as a safe distance for this?
The clearing had almost vanished behind the firestorm and the blades. What air wasn't pressed aside for an icy weapon was engulfed in the golden flames, feeding their voracious rage as they leapt for their prey. The heat was unbearable even from the tree-line, tempered only by the supernatural chill of the blades that didn't so much as begin to thaw in the hell that the clearing had become.
Nothing should survive in that.
And yet, at least three things did.
So this—
The flames erupted outwards for a bare instant, a massive expulsion of force pressing them aside to clear a space. Within that space something black against the gold blurred, purple tracery staining the air as the blades that flew forward even as their fellows were repulsed met a greater force coming the other way and shattered.
—is what it means—
The fire across the clearing gathered in an instant, rising up in a great column that almost seemed to sport a glaring fox's face before it collapsed forward in a great wave on the momentarily-cleared spot. At the same time, every blade that had stabbed itself fruitlessly into the earth rose again, shooting like iron filings to a super-magnet towards the figure in black.
—to be strong...
The air screamed and burned. What grass remained became black, blew apart into ash and then came apart again as even the ash was burned, the acrid scent of burning grass lingering for the barest instant before being consumed like everything else. All that was unburned were the blades, that gave no mind to the heat even as they filled all the space where the figure stood with blades finer than the sharpest human knife.
There was nothing there to hit.
How—
Dark purple light erupted from nowhere, an intricate octogramic design imprinting itself on the world, thrumming with a rhythm perpendicular to reality's song. The sigil then disgorged a blurring figure in black above and behind the golden figure of Yasaka, revealed for a moment as the clearing's obscuring flames were all gathered. Ominous purple light trailed behind the figure as it fell faster than the world should allow, reaching out for the leader of the Yōkai—
—and then vanished once more, as the Priestess of Amaterasu spread out her nine tails and the world around her once more erupted into flame, a miniature supernova birthed from nothing with a chilling roar and unleashing a wave of ravenous fire in all directions. Several dozen trees were reduced to cinders in an instant, burning so quickly not even the suggestion of a scent could escape the conflagration to a chorus of firework blasts from boiling sap.
—am I—
The great figure of a nine-tailed fox stood from the bonfire, it tails lashing so quickly they seemed almost one solid mass. Its mouth opened wide, and the roar of flames issued forth as it turned towards another part of the clearing where the octogramic design once more appeared.
—ever supposed—
This time, the focus of Kuroka's magic didn't disgorge her. Instead, a veritable tidal wave of purple mist spewed forth, spreading across the entire clearing in an instantaneous rush that sent a massive wind outward from the displaced air, the sound a grim parody of booming thunder.
—to fight—
The mist lasted only a moment – then, with a great white flash, it fell from the air as a frozen rain that scattered across the ashen, baked earth of the clearing with a sound like a hundred thousand hailstones striking a hundred roofs. Grayfia's distorted form was barely visible inside a bubble of ice, which shattered an instant later in an outward wave of snow that coated everything up to the treeline, dampening the sounds of the battle to come and revealing a humanoid figure rushing in from behind her, blasting straight through the outgoing barrier of powder on an attack run.
—like this?
A palisade of ice, its thickness beyond any castle wall, its height greater than the surrounding trees, its colouration a blue that was almost black with supernatural density, erupted from the earth between Grayfia and the figure.
Then it erupted outwards with a sound like a hammer on the world's largest disco ball almost as it formed, a malevolent flash of purple light preceding and following Kuroka as her illusion fell away in the aftermath of her Touki-infused blow, her arms outstretched and malicious flame in her hands as she reached for the Strongest Queen—
—and instead passed through the instantly-there octogramic shape of her focus, barely carrying herself away from the form of the golden fox as its leap ended directly where she would have been. Its voracious body passed within inches of Grayfia, who simply carried herself backward on a wave of ice and once more began to conjure icy blades, targeting Kuroka where she had appeared directly across the clearing from her starting point.
It only been seconds since Koneko had dragged me from what little remained of the house in the clearing; I was almost sure of that. Yet, the clearing had erupted in flames and purple mist and ice, and blurred figures had been moving everywhere…
My hearing was ruined, though as moments passed I could feel my eardrums slowly knitting themselves back together (and wasn't
that a disgusting sensation). My eyes were lidded and watering from the flames and the flashes of light. But I could still make out, for a bare instant, the three figures standing in the clearing.
Yasaka, whose silhouette I could just barely see within the body of a flaming fox.
Grayfia, stood atop a pillar of ice and surrounded by suspended blades.
Kuroka, low to the ground as the eldritch glow of her sigil cast its light over her.
That image burned itself into my memory as surely as the body of the fox burned itself into my retinas. The screaming and the blasts and the roars of the battle recorded themselves through my ears like the words to my favourite song. The smell, a chaotic olfactory collage wherein lay temple incense, a winter morning's snow and a smell like flowers that felt like it was searing my nostrils, engraved itself so thoroughly in my mind that I was sure I could never smell any of those three scents or their like again without recalling this very moment.
And it was as well that the scene before me made its mark so well, because a bare second later it was gone as the madness began again.
It was faster than before, I thought. The pace of the battle had accelerated and escalated, towering structures of ice erupting into view as the golden flames flowed around or through them, whole castles pressing themselves into existence alongside unadorned and yet elaborate paths that hosted Amaterasu's wrath. The flaming body of the fox vanished somewhere amid the maelstrom, but occasionally its tails seemed to appear once more as pillars above even the structures of Grayfia's ice before they slammed down once more into the clearing.
The trees around the clearing uprooted themselves as one, growing in fast and unnatural ways as their roots wrapped around one another to form legs and they erupted forward into the battle.
They were ash before they took ten steps, but in return there was a great purple flash from within the chaos and the golden flames all seemed to stutter as one. They roared back to life an instant later, but pulled inward, not spreading as far and seemed to whirl around a central point.
Then it all came to a head.
The earth of the clearing, baked into something between glass and clay then shattered like either as its temperature was constantly dropped and raised to cataclysmic degrees, erupted into the air as a great fountain to make way for what lay beneath. An entire forest, most of the trees far beyond my recognition, alongside a riotous collection of grasses, ferns and flowers, reached for the sky through the ice and flames, upsetting and then crushing every structure of ice just as they seemed to smother the flames in the press of leaf and branch.
It didn't last long enough to be appreciated; every single plant froze as one in a rolling wave of white light, becoming perfect ice sculptures of plants before the golden flames exploded into being once more at the new growth's heart. Ice became water became vapour then
rose, a massive wind erupting outward and upward from the clearing and carrying with it clouds and rain that spread water over what felt like it must have been the entire forest.
It was another frozen moment. Yasaka, the edges of her body aglow with golden flames that seemed to extend her tails by metres; Grayfia, standing sure-footed on a floating disc of ice; and Kuroka, standing
atop her sigil this time and looking haggard.
"I just wanted...to keep Shirone safe," she said.
It was strange. My hearing should still have been busted to hell and back, I could
feel that my eardrums still had holes in them, but I could hear her as clearly as if she was standing beside me.
"Just the two of us, like it used to be. No more Yōkai, no more Devils….just us. Just family."
The octagram at her feet glowed brighter. It began to rise, its base remaining at her feet but its head tilting back toward her as it re-oriented to stand behind her. "But then
you had to come along," she snarled. "The leader of the Yōkai who never tried to help, and the Strongest Queen who only cares about Shirone because her husband's sister doesn't want to be without her
pet."
There was a whistling sound – a sound like an oncoming train…
"I won't let you interfere!" Kuroka declared, rising to her full height and spreading her arms as the octagram behind her began to spin and its glow reached new heights. The whistling began to pick up, growing louder yet lowering its tone. I felt a breeze begin to move my hair.
Blades and flame began to lash out once more, Kuroka presenting herself as an unmissable target. Coming the other way, they met a
tide of wood that arose from the earth, cresting high above our heads as the smells of incense and midwinter were momentarily overrun with the scent of loam and sap. The arboreal mass curled forwards, coming down atop the waves of ice and fire to crush and smother them – and though itself caught ablaze, though every blade vanished to its very root in the wood, still more came.
It was a never-ending, unrelenting force of growth. Every flame that found purchase drowned in living bark; every blade wasted its strength on unfeeling heartwood, only to become a part of the structure as the paths they cut were sealed behind them.
"I won't let you hurt us!"
Kuroka was still standing tall behind her defence. I could see her, from where Koneko and I were resting – her pose almost a supplication before the heavens, except for the unbending will in her posture and the emotion burning in her eyes. Her voice rose above the roar of flames, above the constant
thud of icy blades embedding themselves in wood with a frequency like rainfall, above even the bone-rattling groan of hundreds of tonnes of wood growing constantly before her.
Her voice rose above it all – and so did something else.
It was certainly no whistle, now. The sound of moving air was a roar to match any jet or dragon, the wind pouring into the clearing from all around and carrying with it all that it passed. Ash, the chunks of clay and glassy dirt that had been thrown aloft earlier, sticks and whole branches and leaves...I even felt myself starting to move a bit, before Koneko grabbed me around the shoulders again and latched onto a tree with her other arm.
Kuroka raised her hands high, and every cloud that had formed just moments before returned with a vengeance, funnelling into a vortex above her that began to spark and crackle with actinic light. At the same time, the infinite wooden defence in front of her abruptly froze in place.
Literally.
What must have been every single blade that had been embedded in its form seemed to erupt outwards as one, growing with every bit of the speed that the wall itself had displayed. They pierced every side like needless, digging into the ground or reaching to the sky, and the growth stopped in its tracks.
In that instant where the wall held still – when it was no longer an infinitely-regenerating natural bulwark, but rather simply many tonnes of kindling-in-waiting – Yasaka struck.
Side-on as we were, I could see the way her fox-shaped aura streamlined around her, how it thinned and stretched outwards like an arrow while maintaining its basic shape. What I
couldn't see was its actual motion, as there was an ear-splitting roar to rise above even the screaming winds that I could only compare to the sound of a rocket lifting off.
The wall barely slowed her down. One moment Yasaka stood outside the wall; the next, with an outward rush of heated air and the smell of charcoal, there was a great rent torn in the structure that burned at its edges and was charred black all the way through.
Splinters, embers and debris that was both at once showered outward. The cloud of it enveloped Kuroka, still standing tall – and she didn't flinch away from the great golden fox that bore down on her even slightly.
Instead, she threw her hands forward and declared,
"I WON'T LET YOU TAKE SHIRONE AWAY FROM ME AGAIN!"
Then the world exploded.
Or at least, that was what it felt like.
Everything within me and without me began to shake, an earthquake that seemed to ripple through space itself. The howling of the wind was joined by the rolling crash of thunder that never stopped, obliterating my hearing once more. Even as my eyelids slammed closed, forking lightning and a radial flash that seemed infinitely bright still pierced straight through my retina and stabbed their way into my brain.
It could only have lasted seconds. But it was at least a full minute before I was even able to open my eyes, and found that Koneko and I were both lying nigh-concussed at the base of the tree which she had clung to hard enough to shatter the bark.
That was all I noticed about our situation though – mostly because what was happening in the clearing took the rest of my attention.
The immaculate yet practical workings of ice, blades and walls and pillars that pierced the earth and night, collapsed or turned away.
The chaotic yet intricate tides of flame, great tails and tongues and waves that brought the sun to earth and devoured all before them, strained just to exist and were silent as their roars were swallowed in a greater sound.
A hurricane had touched down in the clearing.
The winds tore great gouges from the earth and rendered all that it lifted into dust. Rain that less 'rain' and more horizontal bullets of water traced paths within the winds, piercing all before it. And above, the clouds still remained, a great downward-facing funnel that ended in a flashing maw. The light within danced back and forth, creating an incomprehensible pattern in the dark, then stabbed out – blasting craters in the earth below, or striking at the debris already in the wind, burning and fusing and otherwise destroying. Even outside the area of its true effect as we were, I wondered if Koneko was having as much trouble breathing as I was – if even her sense of smell had failed her as nature conspired to steal away the air from our every breath.
And through it all moved Kuroka.
Yasaka was visible as a heavily-shrouded golden glow where she struggled to stand her ground; Grayfia's was, it seemed, the only space within the hurricane that remained untouched behind opaque walls of ice that nevertheless suffered in the winds, chunks torn out or blasted away by the lightning that struck.
But it was Kuroka who drew the eye.
She wasn't so much a presence as the suggestion of one; the anomaly in the winds, the piece out of place among the infinitely complex chaos of the hurricane. Where she moved, the winds were both fiercer and not there at all; the eye of the storm, where it was both at its greatest calm and its greatest rage.
Any barrier Grayfia offered, she tore down with hands shrouded by wind that could grind mountains into dust.
Any flame Yasaka conjured, she crushed beneath feet whose whirling covering strangled the golden brilliance in its crib.
She stalked across the clearing, heading straight for Yasaka. The golden light that was her target flared to a new height, pressing against the wind, and in an instant the flaming body of the fox once more appeared. It was smaller, and ragged, but it leapt into the hurricane as it went for Kuroka's throat—
—and when her hand came down, fingers clawed and slashing, it was blown apart in a show of actinic light that pierced the flames and broke them apart from within.
There wasn't a second fox. The golden light didn't grow brighter; if anything, it dimmed, and Kuroka still advanced.
She stopped, just at the edge of the flames, and I wondered if she said anything as her arm was raised high. Lightning flashed, playing around her fingers as the deadly white was backlit by malevolent purple, and I forced myself not to turn away from what I
knew was coming next...
Until a massive, crystalline structure erupted from beneath Kuroka, encasing her entirely.
Grayfia arose from beneath the earth on a pillar of ice, a transparent wall surrounding her and turning away the winds as they began to die. The funnel above was beginning to fail, the sound of the hurricane quieting.
Outside the structure Grayfia had conjured, at least.
It is...effectively impossible to describe what a hurricane trapped in ice looks like. It is, by its very nature, such a chaotic thing to view that it could never be embodied in just words.
But I saw it anyway, heard the way the ice was giving even over the dying roar of the storm. And I saw it as Grayfia raised both her hands, cupping them before her as her gaze remained locked on the frozen form of Kuroka.
I didn't hear the words she spoke, though I saw her lips move.
But I damn well saw the Light that was born in her hands.
It felt like my entire thought structure ground to a halt as what was unmistakably a softball-sized star of
Light appeared in the hands of the Strongest Queen. The occurrence went beyond my ability to compute, and so I was completely blank on exactly what happened next.
But the aftermath was simplicity itself to see.
Ice grew from Grayfia's hands, glowing with the Light that it contained, and erupted forward in a spearing movement even as Kuroka's hurricane finally broke through her containment.
Then they collided, and the world shook.
Kuroka had armored herself with the very fury of nature itself. She had made weapons of the rain and lightning, a shield of the wind and cloud. An extension of her ability with Senjutsu that I hadn't even conceived as possible, a technique that had let her stand against the hand of Amaterasu on Earth and one of the Underworld's greatest warriors
together.
But for all the power of that technique, she herself was still a Devil – Reincarnated, yes, but a Devil anyway. And there is no bane to the works of a Devil that is more effective than the Light.
The spearing pillar that Grayfia had wrought was destroyed in the clash – the Light faded and gone without the icy prison to contain it – but its role had been fulfilled. The hurricane which Kuroka had wrapped herself in was wrent asunder, its winds scattered hither and yon as the flashes of lightning grounded through the earth she fell to when the pillar struck.
And just like that, the clearing was filled with nothing more than a deadly silence.
The golden glow faded from around Yasaka, the Priestess herself picking herself up from where she had fallen to her knees and breathing hard as she seemed to sway slightly. Grayfia spared her a single glance, then walked down to the ground on a staircase that froze itself into being below her every step and evaporated once more behind her.
She stepped onto the ground beside Kuroka, who lay on her back and stared upward. Not unseeing – at least, I didn't think so – but most certainly unmoving.
There was a long moment when the two women simply looked at one another. Then Grayfia extended a hand and into it dropped a frozen blade, a frigid falchion arcing towards Kuroka's undefended throat…
Only to be halted by a panicked cry of denial mere moments before it bit into soft flesh.
While I was still regaining my bearings, Koneko had left my side in a blur of motion, sprinting forward towards Grayfia and her sister. The sword had been curving towards Kuroka before Koneko was even halfway across the distance between them, so she'd had no choice but to scream her plea, as though beseeching the heavens themselves to spare her kin.
Heaven, predictably, did not answer – but Grayfia's hand was stayed, if only for the moment. Long enough, in any event, for me to struggle to my feet and lope towards them. The soles of my shoes burned with faint black embers, a sign of the Count's slowly renewing and unconsciously invoked powers.
With the aid of Avenger's dregs, I managed to arrive at Koneko's side in time to hear her heartfelt, heart-
wrenching whisper, my dear friend verbose and choked in her distress.
"I thought that she wasn't my sister anymore, that I could handle never seeing her again. But...but...I can't sit by and watch her die! Even if she abandoned me, I...I still love her!" Tears streamed down Kobeko's face, the white haired girl looking smaller and more vulnerable than I'd ever seen her.
My heart felt like it was being torn apart at the sight, and I had to force back tears of my own. Grayfia clearly felt similarly, if the way her face twisted in discomfort before returning to a mask of cold professionalism a moment later was any indication.
I shakily cleared my throat, then spoke quietly. "I-if I could s-say something as well?"
The Strongest Queen's attention was a potent and terrifying thing even when there was no hostility to it, a fact that I found out immediately. But in spite of my near-crippling fear, my slowly healing wounds, and my exhaustion barely staved off by adrenaline and willpower, I still spoke.
"N-now, I don't p-pretend to know all the d-details of this s-situation," I stuttered nervously, before taking a deep breath and forcing a modicum of steel into my core, "but summary execution seems extremely harsh, not to mention hasty." Internally I breathed a sigh of relief; no way I'd have been taken seriously sounding like I was.
"What about a trial, what about due process? I don't know how the Underworld's justice system works, but shouldn't there at least be those?"
Grayfia's gaze centered on me fully, feeling as though it would pierce me physically. My whole body shivered, but somehow I managed to remain standing. Her boreal blade still perfectly positioned to open Kuroka's carotid artery (if not sever the prone woman's neck cleanly), the Lucifer's Queen spoke. Her words were quiet and even, but each syllable seemed to resonate through my very soul with barely-leashed
power.
"And why do
you care, Magician? The Stray Cat almost
killed you,
would have killed you had
we," she gestured between herself and Yasaka, who'd arrived at her side in the meantime, "not arrived. For what
possible purpose could you be defending her?"
To her credit, Grayfia managed to regulate her tone in such a manner as to sound genuinely curious rather than scathingly incredulous.
I heaved a gusty sigh. "I could spout about justice being more important than my personal feelings, but my ideals are probably meaningless to you. I could also rant about the need for a fair and unbiased trial with proper representation, but I know that such a system is cheatable in
mundane courts; who knows how flawed it'd be in literal hell."
I looked over at Koneko, so small, sad, and subdued, and spoke. "But at the end of the day, it boils down to the fact that Kuroka's death would hurt
her very badly, and I'd throw away any grudge in a heartbeat for the happiness of the people I care about."
Grayfia regarded me for a long, tense moment, then closed her eyes. I could almost feel duty warring with emotion behind her closed eyes, and for one long moment I feared that our words would fail, that she would take Kuroka's life.
And then the frozen blade dissolved into flakes of snow, melting near-instantly in the warmth of the night.
Grayfia let out a short sigh. "I will have to speak to the Lord Lucifer about this, but for now, the Stray Cat will have a stay of execution." Her gaze shifted from me to Kuroka, and sharpened instantly. She spoke no words, but none were needed. The message was clearly communicated: if Kuroka put one foot out of line, the mercy she'd been shown would evaporate as swiftly and surely as Grayfia's blade had moments before.
Koneko dashed away the tears on her face, before slowly walking towards her sister. As the two estranged nekoshō looked at one another, what felt to be all the weariness in the world crashed down on my shoulders. I sank to one knee, chest heaving, then fell towards the ground, my face nearly colliding with the baked dirt before thin, small arms caught me and lowered me gently to the ground.
As blackness took me, I heard the dulcet tones of Yasaka begin to speak, though her words escaped me...
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
While a great battle of magic and Senjutsu had come and passed in Kyoto, preparations were being made for a confrontation of a far more intellectual sort in Kuoh.
Detective Kenta Shirogane had worked through the night, running through his contacts, digging through conspiracy sites and government documents alike. Any other man wouldn't have been able to access most of what he did, but the Japanese government was rather fond of him and his 0% failure rate, so he received a special dispensation.
Alas, none of what he could find was conclusive in the slightest...at least, not until he thought to compare the surnames of two notable Kuoh Academy students to the Ars Goetia.
"Rias Gremory and Sona Shitouri...or
Sitri. Could it really be so simple?" The detective mused, setting down his pen.
He had written down all of his hypotheses and deductions for posterity, then a cover letter for himself in his own personal cypher, and stowed all of his research away, just in case the beings he intended to meet had some means to assail his mind. Paranoid, but he could afford to assume nothing. This was a completely unknown world he was about to step into, one that could destroy and remake his very beliefs on the fundamental level.
In spite of himself, a faint smile crossed Kenta's face. A feeling he hadn't felt in quite a while began to spark inside him, a sense of giddiness at the thought of
learning.
He didn't know what awaited him past the auspicious doors of Kuoh Academy, and that terrified him, to be sure. But underneath that terror was something he'd thought he'd lost. Something that had belonged to a boy who'd loved mystery novels and
tokusatsu shows, who'd dreamed of becoming a modern-day Sherlock Holmes. Who'd wanted to see the unseen, know the unknown, to learn everything he could about
anything he could.
He'd thought the cruelty of the world and the countless tragedies he'd witnessed had torn from him every bit of that boy, but…
Maybe, just
maybe, he could regain some of that wonder.
Only time would tell.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
AN: I must apologize for the delay on this chapter; I've been busy with my other fic and real life, but I've got a fair idea where I'm going next with the story, so delays should be...reduced, at least. Now, many thanks to Teninshigen for his wonderful beta work, as well as him helping me give shape to the fight scene in this chapter. He really enabled it to transform from a vague idea into a masterwork. Additionally, I'll thank Magery and the denizens of the Avengers forum for giving me ideas as to how a fight between three such significant people should go.
I hope you all enjoy!
Edit: The fight scene has been retooled at the advice of Magery, who is as always a wonderful help.
