Within the eerie silence of the rift corridor, amidst the scene of blood and erased ashes, Nowa didn't smile nor did he argue. Only gave a slow nod, accepting the label and all the complicated emotion behind it.
"Probably…" he mumbled
A reflexive impulse made him reach to pat her head. But his hand halted mid-air. A superimposed image of his hand, It was covered in the alien blood of the Fractureborns, the blood of the gods, the blood of fallen comrade, the blood of loved ones, the blood of the people he failed to save, a visceral reminder of the chasm between his world and hers. He lowered his arm, letting the gesture die unspoken.
"You need new clothes, Reimu. But first, let me untie—"
"Why?" Reimu cut him off, her voice small as she looked away, sobbing, ashamed. "...I wasn't that welcoming to you. I was suspecting you, testing you, frustrated with you, never gave my trust on you… I gave you every reason to push you awa—"
"It doesn't matter." His interjection was swift, cutting through her self-recrimination. "All that mattered was that you asked me. Yukari asked me." His gaze was unwavering. "And deep down, you wanted to be rescued, too."
He paused. Then, in a low murmur. "For decades, I wanted the same, too."
Reimu's breath hitched. She slowly looked at him, truly seeing past the blood, the flames, and the detached exterior. For the first time, she saw the profound, decades of pain in his eyes, the lonely child who had been waiting just as desperately for someone to come for him.
The moment of understanding was shattered by the fresh wave of shame. "S-sure… But I can't go out like this," she whispered, her voice fragile. She pulled her knees to her chest, using the torn hakama to shield her body. "I'm... shattered. I can't let them see me like this… Please, stop looking…"
Nowa's gaze immediately snapped to the featureless ceiling of the corridor, and he closed his eyes. A dry, weary chuckle escaped him.
"I wasn't. But I just have to make sure you're okay."
His concern for her state overrode his hyper-vigilance, his senses focused entirely on her well-being for one, critical second. It was seconds too long.
From the corner of the corridor, a pool of discarded flesh, the remains of the general twitched that wasn't erased. Unseen by Nowa, it coalesced, pulling itself together with a sound of a wet shrinking into a denser, more focused humanoid form. Its eyes snapped open, burning with silent, resurrected fury.
Meanwhile, outside the collapsing rift, the wounded trio stirred.
"Sakuya, Ran," Marisa groaned, clutching the deep ache in her side. "You guys good?" She pushed herself up on one elbow, her face pale but determined, looking over at the Chief Maid and the nine-tailed kitsune.
Ran tried to stand, her legs collapsed slightly. "My connection to Lady Yukari... it's still severed. Something is terribly wrong, this wouldn't be happening if I had my powers…" Her ears flattened against her head in distress.
Sakuya, leaning against a tree, nodded grimly. She touched the dark blue coat, still draped over her shoulders, Nowa's coat. "He is still in there. With Reimu." Her sharp eyes studied the flickering, unstable rift Nowa had broken into. "And that rift looks like it's closing. If it collapses while they're inside..." She didn't need to finish the thought.
A sudden, familiar warmth flooded Ran's core. Her posture straightened, her wounds knitting together as her youkai energy flared back to life with a visible, golden shimmer. "Huh? My power... The connection is restored! Lady Yukari is alright!" A wave of immense relief washed over her, followed immediately by a surge of professional duty. Her gaze snapped back to the flickering rift.
"That's cool," Marisa said from where she sat, clutching her side with a pained grin. "So, can you, like, pop in there and grab the Old-timer and Reimu? Preferably before that thing," she pointed a finger at the unstable rift, "eats my best friend?"
Ran's expression tightened. "The boundary is too unstable for a precise retrieval. A standard border-crossing could destabilize it completely." Her tails twitched with agitated energy as she calculated. "I can attempt to anchor it from this side, but I cannot guarantee how long it will hold."
"Then we don't have the luxury of waiting for a perfect solution," Sakuya stated, pushing off the tree. Though wounded, her voice was absolute. "Lady Ran, stabilize the exit. I will go through."
"With all due respect, Sakuya, you can barely stand, what if the enemies inside the rift are all active?" Ran countered, her focus split between the conversation and the complex boundary manipulation she was already beginning.
"Then it seems we are all operating at a loss," Sakuya replied, a single knife appearing in her hand. "But Reimu shouldn't be left behind."
Without another word, she kicked off from the lakeshore, flying through the grim sky. The dark blue coat Nowa had given her, the one that had already saved her life, flapped and waved behind her. The rift crackled before her, spitting out shards of null-space. "I'm going in. Hold the exit."
Sakuya plunged through the unstable rift. The transition was not clean, not like Yukari's elegant passages. It was a violent, grinding tear through layers of hostile reality. For a moment, she felt Ran's anchoring energy fighting to keep the tunnel stable around her.
Then, she was through. She landed in a crouch on the other side, her body screaming in protest. The scene before her was one of absolute dichotomy.
On one side, a trembling, disheveled Reimu, desperately trying to preserve her modesty amidst torn clothing. On the other, a man drenched in alien blood, his white T-shirt stained a grotesque black and purple. Knelting with his eyes firmly closed.
"Is that you, Beckitzer?" Sakuya called out.
Reimu flinched, snapping her head around and frantically trying to cover herself further. Nowa didn't open his eyes. "Yeah. Help me untie her. I don't have the privilege to look. I gave my word."
Sakuya let out a breath of relief and moved toward Reimu. But from the corner of her eye, a blur of condensed hatred, the resurrected general, unleashed itself. It used their moment of conversation as a shield.
"Beckitzer, Behind you!"
Nowa's eyes snapped open, but it was a fraction of a second too late. The humanoid general slammed into him with the force of a meteor, lifting him off his feet and sending him backward into the far wall of the corridor with a sickening crunch of impact. He was pinned, a spike of glitching elongated matter erupting from the general's arm to impale his shoulder and hold him fast.
"Nowa!" Reimu screamed, scrambling backward but unable to flee with her hands still bound and the accumulated beating she received.
Sakuya became a silver blur, dashing not toward the general, but toward Reimu the priority. But the general was faster. It snatched Reimu off the ground with its free hand before Sakuya could cover half the distance.
"LET ME GO!" Reimu screamed. Punching, kicking with what little strength remained in her.
The general didn't bother, with a flick of its wrist, summoned a concussive vortex of wind that swatted Sakuya out of the air. She twisted, hurling a volley of knives in mid-fall, but the gale-force winds deflected them, sending the silver blades clattering uselessly against the walls.
The general now held both of them: Reimu, trapped in its grasp, and Nowa, impaled and immobilized against the wall. Its faceless head swiveled between its two captives, a low, glitching hum of triumph emanating from its core.
Nowa gritted his teeth against the searing pain in his shoulder. The glitching spike wasn't just physical; he could feel it trying to corrupt his very essence, to convert him into one.
"Let... her... go," he snarled, Voidflame sputtering weakly around the point of impalement, the corrupting energy was being slowly cauterized by his power.
The general ignored him, its focus on Reimu, it spoke in their language. "The Organic Reality byproduct concept... will be ours," it monotoned, its grip tightening.
From the ground, Sakuya pushed herself up. Her time-stop was useless, her knives were ineffective. Her eyes met Nowa's across the chamber. A silent, desperate understanding passed between them. They were out of conventional options.
It was in that moment that Reimu, held aloft and utterly vulnerable, did the only thing she had left. She stopped struggling. She closed her eyes, and a different kind of energy began to emanate from her, not the flashy power of purification, but something older, more fundamental, more Narrative in nature. The latent, sleeping power of the Shrine Maiden, the true anchor of Gensokyo, began to stir in self-defense.
The general faltered. "Anomaly. Power signature... unaccounted for."
Then, its featureless face contorted into a ghastly, glitching grin, as if this was the moment it had been tasked for by Zero's prediction. With a swift, deliberate motion, it produced a rune gem from its own substance, a perverse mirror of Nowa's own craft. The gem pulsed with a sickening, familiar energy.
"Rune reality: Deny!" The gem exploded not with light or sound, but with a wave of absolute temporary nullification. The nascent power emanating from Reimu was severed, snipped away like a thread for the time being. Her eyes snapped open wide, not in power, but in total horror. In that moment, she knew, not even plot armor would save her.
Nowa stared, shocked. "That's… that's the same conceptual framework as my runes…!"
But rage overrode shock. With a guttural roar, Voidflame erupted from his free fist. Instead of striking the general, he drove the erasing fire directly into his own impaled shoulder. The glitching spike vanished, unwritten from existence in a burst of agonizing sensation. He was free, but the cost was a gaping, void-black wound.
He launched himself forward in a desperate dash, the wall where he was at cratered as the mana detonated to propel him. His fingertips stretched, mere inches from Reimu's outstretched hands. Her scream of "HELP!" was cut short as the general stepped backward through a portal that snapped open and shut off.
SLAM.
Nowa crashed hand-first into the solid wall where the portal had been, the impact cratering the surface. He staggered back as he steps back, his body trembling with adrenaline, pain, and the failure.
He stared at his palm. Visions flooded his mind: Amy dying by his power; Childrens he could not save before meeting Bion; the deaths of Master Oldman, Bion, and Lancer; his adopted daughter Fenlia dying by his hands; the innocent equilibrium gods he'd slain; the people he failed to connect with who died for his cause during his great wandering; the countless others he couldn't save in time; a fallen friend he locked up in a site built to contain anomalies, until he ended up in the barren desert where Yukari had found him. And now Reimu Hakurei, from the Touhou universe.
He grabbed his own face, his fingers clawing at his skin as a raw, guttural roar of pure, absolute fury tore from his very soul.
"NO!"
The sound echoed in the now-empty corridor, a testament to a repeating pattern that he had to endure against the multiverse itself.