/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>46328168
—
It happened in the span of a blink.

One moment nothing, next there's a terrible buzz resounding in my ears, fine cascades of blood exuding from the twin orifices; a massive hole in the ceiling exposes the cloudy sky of a winter day and Meiling stands in front of me, an arm outstretched towards the now non-existent back of the fake shrine, fuming in a pale blue, shards of infinitely refracting glass on fire making out the edges of the destroyed wood and fabric. Everything falls into place as my hands rise, sigils pressed against my ears to heal only the superficial wounds caused by whatever happened: Sekai made her movement.

Meiling huffs and puffs, her arm stiff and eyes forward, gawking at the damage of Sekai's attack: not only the entire back of the shrine was erased, but part of the forest was also; accumulated snow melted away into clouds of vapor and the grass burned down. One attack, in a tenth of a second…

“Don't move.” I say as the overwhelming weight of the situation begins to settle, but I do not panic. The guardian watches as I grab her scarred arm, viridian sigils of superficial healing grouping around my fingertips to heal the fresh, root-pattern marking extending throughout all the arm to the shoulder, blood spurting from eruptions: lightning. “What happened?”

“A thunderbolt, aimed for you… I deflected it, b-but the kid is strong, damn—not even born and already capable of producing something like that?” She frowns, likely from the glacial feeling of the restorative magic mending skin and muscle. Sekai heard everything we talked about, but likely not my inner thoughts, meaning the barriers worked to a degree… “You don't look affected, huh?”

I cannot tell her. My thoughts are my only safe place… probably.

Killing Anon is a facade; the reversed spell by itself was unnecessarily complicated to a complete manual cast just so I could have something to use against Sekai: or she kills us before I complete the spell and her father dies—highly implausible, as it's unlikely she'd have kept us around if we had no utility—or she takes us to her world and talks with us. Killing the man would've stripped us of our only bargain chip, as Sekai cannot interact directly with this plane… I doubt I’d live after doing so, but keeping this facade is how we win. It's hard to say if all from now on is predetermined or, by attacking me, she's revealed not having integral control of Remilia's fate… Either way, it doesn't change the two alternatives on the table.

I look at Meiling's arm, not entirely healed but useful again; the guardian is staring at me with an utter calmness that speaks of many battles. “The spell is missing only one glyph. If I have ten more seconds, it can be completed…” I deflect the subject, turning my eyes towards Anon—

—who's frozen in time… No, not really. It's slowed down time to an impossible degree, his and Yukari's mouths in the process of moving, their chests swelling with breathing still. Sekai has slowed down time rather than stopping it—why…?

A yell—my name…?—; gravity then shifts, two strong arms encapsulate me, blood-crimson hair flows in the edges of my vision, an incomprehensible blur…

I'm looking at the fake shrine lying on the snow by the pond.

A single moment of silence follows…

Then, a pink firestorm consumes the shrine, barely missing carbonizing me and Meiling—everything happening in less than a second. The shrine is burned to the ground by the intense, flaring pink—why pink…?—lifting thick curtains of snow vapor and a horrid sizzling noise. The fire swiftly engulfs everything in its path as it burns through the forest, leaving behind shattered fragments of phantasm glass and a desolate scene.

If Meiling wasn't here, I'd be dead twice over.

She releases me, calibrating her breathing with a martial technique as she gets up, looking over at the destroyed shrine—the man and Yukari are alive and well, unaware in the physical world of all this… Also of the golden pillar around them, transparent in nature and ever so shifting in runes and words unknown to me… No, not entirely unknown: the ancestral language of the Animal Realm and their Old Magic, barely recognizable and vastly sophisticated. A protection barrier, its complexity beyond my current understanding in impossible levels…

Meiling turns to me, those green eyes broad, confused, and tense, almost fearful for what's to come, yet her body remains ready to move at any smidgen of danger, ironclad like a fortress. “What do we do…? S-She's really trying to ki—”

“She isn't.” The reaction is immediate; her eyes loaded with incredulity. I dust my clothes away, ignoring for now the blood drying up on my hair in exchange for staring at the sky; hopefully, staring back at Sekai. “With these attacks, you've only proven you need us, Sekai. If you don’t take in our demands, I'll merely keep trying to murder your poor father—and, eventually, I'll succeed! Stop this at once and hear us… The choice is yours, child.”